Shukla - Blend for Visual Studio 2012 by example beginners guide: leverage the power of Blend to create, modify, and reuse applications and components for Windows using a practical, hands-on guide

Abhishek Shukla is a tech lead at Cognizant, Milwaukee, US, and completed his MS in software engineering. Over the years, he has worked with multiple technologies, mostly on the Microsoft platform, and has designed an application for Windows, web, and mobile devices. The biggest project of his career until now has been a banking product named Finacle Advizor (http://www.infosys.com/finacle/solutions/Pages/Advizor.aspx), and he wrote the first lines of code for the product. Thereafter, he has been part of multiple projects based on WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, HTML5, and JavaScript. Abhishek enjoys designing and developing applications with cutting-edge technologies and delivering products and applications that have seamless integration with people and processes for optimal results.

He blogs at http://www.abhishekshukla.com.

The organizations he's worked for include Infosys, Bengaluru, India; Sapient, Noida, India; and Cognizant, Milwaukee, US.

This book would never have been possible without the unending support and love of my wife, Easha. Most of the work that I did for this book was done on weekends, nights, vacations, and at other times inconvenient to my family. I want to thank my parents for always helping me follow my ambitions throughout my life, especially my mother, who always spoke only positive things about my work.

I would also like to thank Packt Publishing for showing faith in me and giving me the opportunity to write this book. I would also like to thank everyone who took time out of their busy lives and provided reviews and feedback on the book.

Nicholas Armstrong is a software developer and technology enthusiast currently living in Waterloo, Ontario. A graduate in computer engineering at the University of Waterloo (BASc and MASc), Nicholas is currently VP Engineering at Pravala Networks, a start-up focused on improving multinetwork experiences on mobile devices and connected vehicles. Nicholas has traveled throughout Asia and North America to interact with mobile operators, OEMs, automotive suppliers, and other technology companies.

Nicholas's development interests include user experience, interface design, high-performance web applications, and web services. His recent work has focused on delivering high-performance web services to drive mobile clients and web applications on a large scale and single-page web applications built on top of these services. Over the course of his career, Nicholas has worked extensively with Node.js, Android, WPF, SQL, and .NET and has experience in numerous other languages, platforms, tools, and environments.

Learn more about Nicholas at nicholasarmstrong.com.

Mattias Cibien is a C# programmer with a passion for .NET technologies. After graduation, he started working for a company in Milan (Italy) that specialized in Microsoft technologies. After 2 years, he moved on to work for a famous Italian web company.

His primary skills are in C# (WPF, WCF, and MVC), but he has also worked on other technologies, such as C++. His main interest is in 3D technologies, such as Microsoft XNA (MonoGame right now), DirectX, and OpenGL. To know more about Mattias, visit http://mattiascibien.net.

I'd like to thank Packt Publishing for letting me review my first book, my wife for supporting me and my passions, and the guys from the university with whom I started doing serious programming.

Alexey Tcherniak is a UI/UX designer and a frontend developer with broad experience in creating desktop, web, and mobile applications. He has been working in the IT industry for over 15 years.

After spending several years building websites and creating graphic arts, his focus shifted to UI/UX design, and currently, he is specializing mainly in .NET-based desktop and mobile applications. He uses C#/XAML to design and develop WPF projects, taking on every project with enthusiasm. Also, Alexey is still a graphics designer, creating icons and illustrations for commercial and free use.

Today, he lives a digital nomad's life and enjoys traveling Europe with his wife and two wonderful children, remotely serving businesses from all over the world. You can find out more about the projects he has participated in at www.alexeytcherniak.com.

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