Regarding WPF & attractive UI

Question

i am learning WPF. i saw a very beautiful application called Blu Twitter client developed with WPF. their UI is really glossy.

can anyone give me some tips that how could i create this type of glossy UI with WPF. what i need to do.......need concept.

thanks

Answer 1

Get Expression Blend (it's free if you are student), it is fairly easy to create some fancy UIs with it - it has really nice graphical designer.

Here is tutorial, which explains how to make such glossy control: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mgrayson/archive/2007/02/16/creating-a-glass-button-the-complete-tutorial.aspx . This covers basics of how to compose the graphics from gradients and similar graphical primitives and how to make it react on mouse actions.

But be warned: it takes some graphical talent to actually create original graphics! The design above is clearly a work of graphical artist, even though I don't like it - I hate the preudo-3D effect on the navigation buttons, window state controls and message boxes. And similar window transparency tends to be counter-productive.

EDIT:

Note that Expression Blend is since the 2012 release part of the Visual Studio.