It’s not just developers that get all the cool platforms to play around with. When designing for Windows Phone designers also have their own superb UI design tools in the form of Expression Blend.
The Windows Phone developer tools easily allow a clear separation of design and development responsibilities by allowing the developer to create the logic code in Visual Studio and the designer to concentrate on UI design using Expression Blend. These two tools share the same file structure as well as actual source files. Expression Blend uses XAML for UI design which is consumed by Visual Studio and allows the developer and designers to work seamlessly together in real time.
Placing controls into an app and binding data to these controls couldn’t be easier in Expression Blend. Simply select the type of control you wish to add from the toolbar on the left hand side menu, in this instance a TextBlock…
Add the control to the stage and position accordingly.
Controls can have dynamic elements bound to them; these can be as complicated as animated behaviours but in their simplest and most obvious form can be data bound to a TextBlock.
This will require some cooperation from a developer but once the data is present it is a simple process to link to any control.
Select the element on the stage and go the ‘Common Properties’ panel on the right and click the small white box next to the text property and select ‘Data Binding…’ from the corresponding list…
You will be presented with a window containing all the dtat set up by the development team, just double click on the required sample, done.
Designer tip:
It is easy in Expression Blend to be caught out by copy wrapping issues so ensure you test with extreme sample data to ensure your pages are always presented correctly.
