Using Blend 2.5 Visual State Manager to Create a Silverlight 2.0 Image Viewer

Recently Microsoft released Blend 2.5 June Preview.  So, of course I started looking around to find what was new.  I was blown away by a new panel called the State panel.  This new panel allows you to create State Groups that you can then add states to (called a Visual State Manager (VSM)).  You can even specify the time (in seconds) it takes for a State to transition from one to the next.  So, I then started thinking about a practical application for this new feature.  Of course I could have made an application that had custom buttons (really just a series of grids and not actually a Button Control) and used the State panel to make MouseEnter and MouseLeave effects.  But, this seemed to me to not really show the power of this new feature.  So, then I came up with an idea to make an Image Viewer and use the VSM to handle the animation for me.  Here is how it works: when you roll over the thumbnail it grows to a larger size, when you roll off of it, it shrinks back down to the thumbnail size (see Figure 1-0).  Let’s get started now and build the StateImageViewer UserControl.