Sliverlight animation

Having attended Microsoft's Mix 07, I decided it was high time to have a crack at using Expression Blend to create a basic Silverlight animation sequence. Now I've done very little animation in my time - pretty much just gif animation, so I'm conscious that I am as much learning about animation techniques as Expression Blend and Silverlight. It certainly was a good introduction to using Expression Blend and XAML. I will write the whole thing up in much greater detail alongside the animation on my site when I've tweaked a few things. In fact, I mean to keep at it so will probably publish several versions as I go along. But for now, I just wanted to mention some of the issues that cropped up while they are fresh in my mind.

The first thing that became evident, was the need to be familiar with XAML. Now I have no experience with this at all, but it doesn't actually look too daunting. My first task was to get an eps file into Blend. This meant that I needed to export the eps as a XAML file. For this, I used an Illustrator plugin downloaded from www.mikeswanson.com. This was where I first needed to go into the XAML code and paste it into the page, ensuring the tags were correct. From here on in, I tried to glance at the XAML code as I worked every now and then to try and familiarise myself with it. What I noticed was that any property change or transformation change made in Blend was recorded and stored in the XAML, even if the result was discarded. I became aware the the XAML was starting to bloat with unwanted code. I gained the confidence to go into the XAML and delete what appeared to be extraneous without wrecking the page. It did make me draw a comparisson with WYSIWYG web design tools. Couldn't help thinking that developers could potentially get mightily fed up with designers creating stuff with code-gone-mad results. This reminded me of Robby Ingebretsen's point in his presentation, 'Silverlight, WPF, Expression design projects - where do we get started?' on the second day of Mix 07. Robby introduced the idea of a XAML programmer role in the design/development process, who sits between the designer and the developer to ensure the implementation of design and development runs smoothly. My first little taster of using Expression Blend has certainly made me aware that somewhere along the line it would be an advantage to know XAML. If you're a designer in a large team, then there may be the facility to fulfil this role, but if you are a lone designer, do you learn it yourself or expect the back end developer to tidy up the XAML? So that was just the first issue I faced during my little animation project. More to follow!