After being baffled for a long time about how all the Expression products fit together with Visual Studio, I think I’m finally get the hang of things.
The kids and I have been working on a Silverlight game together (they draw the pictures and I do the programming) and I’ve had a chance to use at least two of the Expression products: Blend and Design.
Here’s a walkthrough of how I used all three products to integrate one of the kids drawings into the game.
Step 1: My oldest son, Aaron, drew a sketch of a monster that he wanted to include in the game. He used pencil and paper.
Step 2: I scanned Zangor and opened up the JPG in Expression Design. Expression Design is similar to Adobe Illustrator and is awesome with vector graphics. It’s even more awesome in that it is integrated into the Expression world so understands things like brushes, XAML, WPF, and Silverlight. Using Expression Design’s B-Spline tool, I traced the hand-drawn monster and colored him in. Easy. I love that radial gradient on his eye.
Step 3: I exported Zangor as a Silverlight control, all ready to be used in my Silverlight game. It was only about 17KB, which is nice. All those fancy graphics, represented in XML. Kinda neat.
Step 4: I’ll use Expression Blend to integrate Zangor into a more full-featured user control that can report on the monster’s health and stats. Expression Blend is the design-focused counterpart to Visual Studio and is great for working with colors, animations, gradients, brushes, transforms, layout, and graphics. It can even work with my B-Spline paths that I created in Expression Design.
Step 5: I’ll use Visual Studio to provide the programming behind the user-control. This will involve calculating health, figuring out the monster’s attacks, when the monster appears, and all the stuff around making the monster actually do something.
And that’s that. Three tools working together in concert, all playing nicely and speaking the same language. It helps to have a lot of RAM to keep these three greedy programs running at the same time, of course.