Expression Blend 2 Tip For Demos

    Wednesday, November 19 2008 - Silverlight

    I can’t believe I missed this before, but there is a toggle button (F4) in Blend that simply make the sidebar windows collapse or expand. This is very cool when you are doing a presentation and the screen resolution is so tiny that the audience cannot see what you are doing with the other windows in the way. For example, the following Blend screenshot shows the Interaction and Properties windows cluttering up the screen so my designer and XAML is hard to see.

    image

    But once I hit F4 it clears the way.

    image

    And hit F4 again and the windows are back.

     

    Yes, very simple … and you might already know this. I admit, this is one of those essential keystrokes I just missed.

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    #1 timheuer on 11.19.2008 at 3:12 PM

    My other favorite is CTRL+0 to zoom-to-fit the currently selected control (yellow boxed) .. very helpful when you've moved a lot around, etc. and you want to get the item clear in focus on the pallette.



    #2 Laurent on 11.19.2008 at 4:05 PM

    Hey John,

    Everyday we learn new things :) For info, you can also get the same result by pressing the Tab key.

    Another useful trick: Modify the zoom factor in Tools/Options. First of al it really impresses the audience (you can do it by sliding a bar, and a WPF scale transform is applied), it's a great way to mention that Blend is built in WPF, and you can choose a better zoom factor for the smaller resolution :)

    Cheers,

    Laurent



    #3 Bill Reiss on 11.19.2008 at 4:14 PM

    Thanks, I didn't know that either!



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    #5 Kevin Yang on 12.08.2008 at 9:19 PM

    tab key can do the same thing



    #6 Andrej Tozon on 12.09.2008 at 3:12 AM

    This is actually kind of an annoyance for me, since I constantly use F4 to show Properties window in Visual Studio. Not only F4 in Blend doesn't show properties, it clears the whole desk :) - which is great, but we already have TAB for that.



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