Microsoft Expression Blend - The Toolbar

Learning about the Toolbar in Microsoft Expression Blend

For starters, let us take a look at the tools on the left side of Blend and how they work. The first two tools are your Selection tools, the Selection tool and the Direct Selection tool. The Selection tool generally selects elements in the art board while the Direct Selection tool allows you to select the children elements. The Direct Selection Tool will also allow you to modify the geometry of elements after they are created. Beneath those two tools are the Scene Manipulation tools. The Pen tool can be used just by clicking and dragging to move the art board around and double clicking it restores the art board at the center. The Zoom with the single click zooms in and with an Alt Click zooms back out. You can also click and drag with the zoom to zoom into a portion of the screen. Double clicking on the zoom tool restores to 100%. Beneath those is the Camera Orbit tool. The Camera Orbit Tool is used when you need to change the position of the camera in a 3D viewport. We will talk about that when we get into 3D lessons later on. Under the Scene Manipulation Tools are the Element Creation Tools. The Eyedropper and the Pink Bucket both allow you to transfer properties from one element to another and the Brush Transform tool allows you to modify gradient and tile brushes to get different effects. Beneath the Element Creation Tools are the Asset Creation Tools. The Drawing Tools include the Pen and Pencil. For all of these tools, by right clicking you can get the submenu that shows specific tools. The Shapes have the rectangle, ellipse and the line. The Layout containers are displayed in the third tool. Text tools in the fourth and the UI Controls in the fifth. Beneath these tools is the Asset Library. The two small chevrons when clicked bring up the Asset Library which contains all of the controls that are part of the windows presentation foundation. You can click on the Show All button to show all of the controls that are currently on your computer. There are also tabs for as you add media, say video clips or images as well as Custom Controls to be displayed in that area. The Search box allows you to type any portion of a string, say for instance the Ink canvass and it will filter the list down to only those controls that help you find the control you are looking for easily.