Expression Blend 3: An Overview

By: Expression Team

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Expression Blend is the tool for interaction design on the Silverlight and .NET platforms and enables user experience concepts to be delivered with full fidelity, from the initial prototype to the completed project.

Since its introduction Expression Blend has helped remove the barriers and bottlenecks that have traditionally existed during the design and development process and Blend 3 has evolved the workflow further, enhancing the designer’s productivity while enabling maximum creativity within the time constraints designers’ work under on a daily basis.

Visual designers can continue using the efficient workflows that you’ve built around Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, once imported your assets retain their full fidelity and editability. Rapidly turn static Photoshop graphics or visual elements drawn in Expression Blend into rich data bound controls such as a custom sliders, scrollbars and listboxes.

The ability to quickly bring an application and static graphics to life is powerful. Complex interactions can be encapsulated into simple reusable elements called Behaviors that as a designer you can easily apply via drag and drop, without writing any code.

Building great applications requires both great design and great development for the application to reach its full potential. The powerful design and development workflow between Expression Blend and Visual Studio allows you to share projects, code, assets and designs for higher productivity and quality. No conversion, no recreation of graphics in code is needed, simply a silky smooth two-way workflow from designer to developer and back again.

Powerful tools and streamlined workflows are more important today than ever. Expression Blend delivers a solution where your concepts and ideas can live through the entire project, end to the end, helping reduce wasted time and resources and deliver applications that exceed your client’s expectations for design, interactivity and usability.

Expression Blend 3 is included with:

Top Features

Silverlight & .NET - Fully leverage the underlying platforms, Silverlight for cross browser, cross platform deployment and WPF for the ultimate Windows client experience.
Utilize your design assets - Extensive and flexible import capabilities from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator ensure a smooth transition of visual design assets from traditional workflows.
Behaviors - Bring a project to life by adding interactivity, animation and transitions using Behaviors, powerful building blocks of interactivity, without writing code.

Demo Video

Overview

Expression Blend 3 revolutionizes the speed and efficiency with which you can take your ideas from concept to completion on the Silverlight and .NET platforms. Concepts and ideas can live through the project end-to-end, reducing redundancy, enhancing creativity and delivering compelling applications that exceed your client’s expectations for design, interactivity and usability.

Compelling Experiences

Expression Blend 3 enables you to iterate and deliver on your ideas faster, creating powerful and refined solutions without compromise for the desktop and the web for your clients. Sketchflow revolutionizes the speed and efficiency you can demonstrate a vision for an application while Behaviors bring an application to life, adding interactivity, animation and transitions without writing code.

Accelerated Results

Expression Blend breaks down the barriers between design and development that have historically slowed the development process to maximize the opportunities for synergy between design and development.

Design time sample data can be imported or created on the fly, robust code editing with XAML, C# and VB Intellisense as well as an improved workspace and design surface all enhance the speed and flexibility that ideas can be moved from concept to production.

Powerful Technology

Using Expression Blend and industry standard .NET technologies such as Silverlight, WPF, XAML, C#, VB, developers can deliver applications that are stable, scalable, accessible, reliable and secure.

The rapid end to end workflow available through Expression Blend, Visual Studio and the Microsoft platform enables the delivery of compelling results to your customers time after time, while still maximizing the investments you’ve already made in other tools and technologies you employ today.