Expression Blend VSM vs Event Driven

Question

I recently used Expression Blend and I found that it has something called Visual State Manager, what is the difference between it and the regular event driven model, and which is better?

Answer 1

Events are for instances of "things" happening e.g.:

• Was I clicked?
• Did my timer fire?
• Is my data ready?

The Visual State Manager is used to manage multiple simultaneous states of a control.

• Am I pressed?
• Is the mouse over me?
• Am I checked?

Events are just callbacks to listening objects, while states are visual states, so basically there are used for completely different purposes. Events can trigger state changes, but that is the only overlap.