Welcome to Foundation Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight! I am very excited about this, my second book, as I love Silverlight and I have a burning passion for developing and teaching it! Throughout the course of the book, I am going to take you step by step from being a novice in Blend 3/Silverlight to being a skilled practitioner who can create your own dynamic rich media Internet applications with animation storyboards, stunning effects, and some pretty advanced coding constructs, such as the , XML serialization to native Silverlight objects, and custom Silverlight panels. By the time you are done with this book, you will know how to create awesome user interfaces, custom s, and amazing state transitions. Because this technology is so new, only a handful of people in the world know how to develop well in it, and those who can are compensated very well and are highly sought after. It?s a rapidly expanding market, and more and more companies are looking for Silverlight developers?if you have those skills, then you?ll be a developer in demand! Silverlight is a very hot topic, and there are many more companies out there looking for designers and developers who can use it well.