Who this book is for

This book is targeted at both designers and developers. As an author, I've found myself in both roles at different points within my professional career and my intrinsic motivation was to create a book that will serve as a useful resource for designers and developers finding their way with Silverlight and Expression Blend.

Developers will find described UI techniques to be useful for them especially the specific and professional design and user experience guidelines for described patterns and controls. Also, they will understand how to use Expression Blend as a design environment while still being able to safely resort to their more natural Visual Studio environment to write and test code logic.

Designers will benefit from this cookbook as Silverlight is still gaining traction amongst them. While most designers are skilled with Flash or Photoshop, Silverlight and Expression Blend are still not their primarily designing environments and tools. With this book they will not only learn enough about technical side of the story but also many design related techniques, approaches, and guidelines while also getting the chance to understand interaction, code-based side of the story.

In my opinion, I believe that the biggest value of this book lies in the numerous guidelines, ideas, methods, and approaches described. They are all here to help you build and implement great user experiences and to make your users happy, satisfied, and passionate about your products and services.