In this blog I wanted to provide a simple overview of some of the features provided as part of the June 2.5 Blend preview  and Silverlight 2 Beta 2.  Two of the key features that have been made available as part of this release is the ability to easily template controls in order to create your own custom skins as well as the new Visual State Manager which helps aid int the development of animations.

So lets get started. The first thing we want to do is have a look at how easy it is to create custom templates for controls using the June preview of Blend. We are going to create a simple Silverlight Application using the default project template provided by Blend. (Shown below)

Once Blend has created our project we need to create some very simple XAML. As this example is going to be VERY simple all we need to do is drag a textbox onto our design surface. Below shows the XAML of our form once this has been done.

Choosing the "Edit a Copy" will present you with the following dialog. Blend now offers you the choice to create a new style resource in a number of locations. For the purpose of the tutorial just take the default settings, this should create the style resource within our current document. 

Whats really cool is that Blend will automatically take you into a design mode for editing the template.From here I made a few changes to the default template. My XAML looks like this after my changes.

So now you can see just how easy it is to create our own control skins within Blend. In part 2 we will extend this example to show you the new VisualStateManager which greatly increases our productivity when creating cool looking animations.

Part 2