Whew! its been along time. There is so much to blog about regarding Avalon, I get blogger block. (Doesn't help there are so few hours in the day... I was hoping Bush would address that in the State of the Union tonight. More tax cuts please, more hours in the day please!)
I am working on posting an article about creating a custom styled button that uses aliased properties, styled ContentPresenters, VisualTrees, VisualTriggers, vector shapes among other cool features. Will post that hopefully tonight or tomorrow night. If you want to get to it while I am working on it here it is. http://www.longhornblogs.com/ndunlap/articles/2203.aspx (Articles, cool! I'm still figuring out how all the features in this blog tool work. If I'm doing it all wrong let me know.)
Robert Wlodarczyk posted on 1/15 about using ImageEffectBlur. One cool way that I use this feature is to create very effective dropshadows on text. Here is a screenshot of some text with ImageEffectBlur on a text element set in the background.

As a designer I am pretty excited to be able to create dropshadows that have enough fidelity and control to compete with the shadows I can create in Photoshop. I've worked with some nasty programmatically drawn dropshadows. Usually its so bad that I resort to creating the dropshadow in Photoshop and then exporting a PNG. So far the only thing I can complain about the dropshadows I create with Avalon is that for some reason they are clipping at the top and left. I will try and figure that out soon.
One cool thing I did too was to create a style with a visual tree that contained two content presenters. The first ContentPresenter is the element that the blur effect gets applied to. The second ContentPresenter is the white text. These are both aliased to the same content. The end result is really quick version of a reusable dropshadow text element. For this I used a button because I dont think we can legally do a visualtree on the text element and I refer to the Button's content property. You need to apply the actual blur effect to a ContentPresenter. I will describe creating a ContentStyle with ContentPresenter styles in the custom button article I referenced above.
<Style def:Name=“DropShadowText“>
<Button />
<Style.VisualTree>
<Canvas>
<!-- This is the element you apply the ImageBlurEffect on to create the DropShadow Effect. -->
<ContentPresenter def:StyleId=“DropShadow“ Canvas.Top=“1“ Canvas.Top=“1“
ContentControl.Content="*Alias(Target = Content)"
ContentControl.ContentStyle="{DropShadowContentStyle}" />
<ContentPresenter def:StyleId=“DropShadow“
ContentControl.Content="*Alias(Target = Content)"
ContentControl.ContentStyle="{WhiteTextContentStyle}" />
</Canvas>
</Style.VisualTree>
</Style>
Now I can create text with a drop shadow on it wherever I want.
<Button Style=“DropShadowText“>Text with a dropshadow on it</Button