Wet Ink Design

The Silverlight Magic 8 Ball

Ok so most of you understand that I'm a designer and not really a developer. I know enough about development to be dangerous I guess. But I have been tweaking a project in my head for a while that I wanted to build but haven't till now.

A few months ago I attended a C# for Beginners class at a local area college. We built a Magic 8 Ball application that I thought would be cool to build in Silverlight. After all, the one we built in class looked like your average grey battelship that most developers have no problem looking at. But for a designer like me with Marketing and Branding experience, I just couldn't in good conscience complete something like that and be ok with it. :)

So I had some spare time and opened up Blend 3 and got started on a design that would be halfway decent and once I finished, switched over to Visual Studio 2008. Now I admit that I had to be coached by a couple of developers at work on the C# for the back-end on this but I pretty much can grasp the concepts of their code.

The design in Blend 3 was pretty easy and I took advantage of its new feature of importing photoshop artwork on the Ball graphics used in the layout. The gradients were designed in Blend along with the button effects. The layout is a grid and the text boxes are laid out appropriately along with the buttons.

Feel free to download the app at the following link and explore the solution in Blend 3.

Download Solution File (free)

You can view the working application on my website at www.wetinkpro.com/8ball

Please leave me any comments you may have concerning the Magic 8 Ball.