Some Magical Operations in Expressions Blend (Windows and Windows Phone)

Introduction

Today, let's discuss some amazing magical operations that are really important in designing the application. Whenever you are designing your own prototype then the grouping, intersecting, making and drawing of paths are really important. You need to become familiar with the operations. For that let's look at what is available in the toolbar that might help us.

Tools in Blend

• Rectangle
  
  Draws rectangles and squares that you can also modify to have rounded corners.
  
  
• Ellipse
  
  Draws ellipses and circles.
  
  
• Line
  
  Draws a straight line between two points.
  
  
• Pen
  
  Draws and modifies paths where you define each node. The Pen tool lets you add, remove and modify nodes in the path.
  
  
• Pencil
  
  Draws freehand paths.
  
  
• Selection
  
  Selects shapes, paths and objects on the artboard that you want to modify.
  
  
• Direct Selection
  
  Select individual nodes on a path after they have been drawn. You can also use the Direct Selection tool to directly select child objects nested inside a parent object on the artboard. These tools are really important and are useful in performing the operations.

Converting Shapes into Path

In Expressions Blend you can convert shapes and text into a path. After converting into a path the direct selection tool can be really helpful to move its nodes and change the shape and the text accordingly.

Changing the corner radius

You can change the corner radius now of the shapes and rectangles. You can now easily make a rounded button as well.

You just need to drag the radius and change it to your desire.

Combining paths

A combination of paths is really important in Expressions Blend. For intersecting for grouping for other operations you need to use the following operations.

1. Two shapes before combining
2. Unite
3. Divide
4. Intersect
5. Exclude Overlap
6. Subtract

You can combine two or more objects (paths or shapes) into one path object. The resulting path object replaces the last object that was selected before combining and adopting the properties of that object. Often, the result is a compound path.

Compound Path

When you have two or more than two paths you can combine them as you need, for example if you want to combine both a rectangle and a circle path.

Conclusion

These are some operations that can prove to be really helpful for you when designing your application. Use them in your applications and make your life easier.

Note: One of the images is taken from the MSDN documentation.

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