Chapter 3. Silverlight Design and Development Tools

Now that we know what Dashboards are and have a good understanding of how to use them, it is time to look at the tools necessary to create them. In this chapter, we will examine Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010. We will focus on what it takes to build Silverlight applications with Blend and Visual Studio. Here are the topics we are going to cover:

• Blend strengths and weaknesses

• Visual Studio strengths and weaknesses

• Visual States

• Storyboards

• Sample Data

• Templates

• Visual Studio

• Debugging

• Developing for Silverlight

• Project management