Expression Blend Service Pack 1 Available

[Administrator]

For those with the VS 2008 RTM, be sure to update your Expression Blend. Here is the link to download.

 

[JuggaloBrotha]

What is expression blend exactly?

 

[JohnH]

Expression Blend is better for designing the visual aspects of a WPF application, while VS is better for implementing the code for such projects. They share the same Xaml source files. Here's an article on how they see Collaboration with Expression Blend scenarios to develop a complete WPF application.

 

[Administrator]

VS 2008 has very poor support for designing WPF applications, it's still early in my opinion although WPF has been around for some time now, the designer support is tremendously lacking. Expression Blend is ultimately what you will use to build the "form" side of your GUI and then use VS 2008 for the code side, as JohnH alluded. Blend is actually very nice to use, it is very different, but it is very nice. I hear Blend is actually built in WPF itself.

I'm pretty excited about WPF but it's not happening anytime soon! For those that don't know, Winforms as end of life, it is a dead product that stops at .NET 2.0. Winforms is no more, however, winforms will be here for a long time to come. WPF is the new forms and the future of winforms, so just like VB6'ers that don't move to .NET, don't be the winforms user that doesn't some day move to WPF. In time XAML will be transparent to the developers just like the .designer.vb files in Winforms, but for now, XAML will be in your face and something you will have to become acquainted with if you're doing anything with WPF in the near term.

The Blend SP1 simply updates Blend to work with VS 2008 RTM. If you have a MSDN Subscription (Premium minimum I think) then you can download Blend as it's part of MSDN. I don't know what it costs retail, but it's a must have for WPF development.