Use Silverlight for a Prototype

Silverlight applications make a great prototyping tool.  For a project destined as an ASP.NET application, it seems it's faster to give your client an idea of the AJAX functionality you'll build into the final product if you mock up it's functionality really quickly using a Silverlight app and Blend.

I do this by setting the background of the default Page.xaml to my Comp screen.  Then in Blend, I set all the page items over the top of their image, using Grids and StackPanels to position them precisely where they go.

A Note about the Imagebrush idea - this is what happened to me (twice) when I created my imagebrush as a resource and then set the background property to that resource:  In design mode of Blend it shows fine - but in the compiled Silverlight application it's blank.

I found that the imagebrush works better for me in my prototype if I create it in Xaml within my Grid definition - in that case it shows up every time.

	 <Grid.Background>
	

	      <ImageBrush  ImageSource="img/screen.png"/>
	

	    </Grid.Background>