Windows Phone 7 Mango: Expression Blend with 4 New Behaviors

published on: 6/1/2011 | Views: N/A | Tags: Blend Binding

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this post I am going to quickly introduce the 4 new Behaviors that come to Expression Blend with the recent Windows Phone 7.1(Mango) release.

NOTE: At first make sure that you have installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta(Mango).

To begin with lets create a new Windows Phone 7.1 Expression Blend project and go to the "Behaviors" tab. As you can see on the next pictures 4 new behaviors have been added. To use them just "drag" and "drop" the target  Action/Behavior on the design surface:

Here is a table that describes each one of the behaviors main features:

1.CallMethodAction Calls a method on the target object. The method being called must be a public method that takes no arguments and does not return a value or a public method whose signature matches that of an event handler. Here is how  CallMethodAction Properties tab should look like:	3.SetDataStoreValueAction Changes the value of a property and optionally animates the property change over a duration of time. Here is how  SetDataStoreValueAction Properties tab should look like:
2.DataStateBehavior Toggles between two states based on a conditional statement. Usually you can compare two values: one value comes from a binding and the other one you can declare explicitly. Here is how  DataStateBehavior Properties tab should look like:	4.InvokeCommandAction Although this action was available(but was not fully functional)  in the previous release as well, the main difference in Mango is that InvokeCommandAction now has a Command property that can be bound to! Invokes a specified ICommand. (the target object that contains the command that you want to invoke.) Here is how  InvokeCommandAction Properties tab should look like:

NOTE: You can find all behaviors in Microsoft.Expression.Interactions.Dll assembly only InvokeCommandAction is declared in System.Windows.Interactivity.dll.

Here is how the new Mango behaviors look like in Expression Blend  "Objects and Timeline" tab:

Update: Here is a comparison between Windows Phone 7.0 and Windows Phone 7.1 Mango:

NOTE: The WP7 Mango documentation is still not available but you can take a look at the Silverlight 4 MSDN documentation.

I hope that the post was helpful. Stay tuned for the rest of the www.windowsphonegeek.com content.

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