In Part 3 of the "Animation Using Expression Blend" series, Jennifer Marsman creates a spotlight animation that traverses in a slow circle using the Expression Blend tool.

In Part 2 of the "Animation Using Expression Blend" series, Jennifer Marsman walks through wiring up animations to start based on events using the Expression Blend tool.

In Part 1 of the "Animation Using Expression Blend" series, Jennifer Marsman walks through creating DoubleAnimations and ColorAnimations using the Expression Blend tool.

For some reason, I'm drawn to creating things that are just cool while not altogether useful (see my Animated Activity Designer post, though one could argue that it may in fact be useful). To that end, I decided to create a Vista Sidebar gadget that displays a screen saver of your choosing. Vista has some good screen savers that it shipped with and I've embedded screen savers before (in fact, I show how to do it in one of my books). So go ahead and grab it from the Windows Live Gallery (link below).

So I got bored a few nights ago and decided to see if I can do some stop motion animation using my wife's Nikon D70 and Windows Movie Maker. After I imported all the pictures I took of my kids (somewhere around 100) into Windows Movie Maker, I went into options and changed the default time to display pictures in the movie when I drag and drop them. The default is 5 seconds and I changed it to 0.25 seconds. I then did a CTRL-A to select all my pictures and dropped them all on the timeline. I then

As I mentioned in my last post, I have uploaded the Animated Activity Designer for use in your own project. A common question I can anticipate being asked is "Why?". So, here's why I created it and my reason as to why you may want to use something like this. First off, the reason I wanted to try to created animated activities within the Windows Workflow designer was merely to see if it was possible. I knew that I could override OnPaint so I pretty much already knew it was going to be possible (otherwise