C H A P T E R  11

Introduction to Expression Blend

So far in this book, the primary focus has been on using Visual Studio 2010 to create Silverlight applications. Visual Studio provides developers with a strong integrated development environment (IDE) for developing rich interactive (or Internet) applications (RIAs). However, you may want your Silverlight applications to contain some complicated design elements, and in these cases, it’s not much fun to edit the XAML manually. To address this problem, Microsoft created Expression Blend, a product built to edit XAML documents visually.

Whereas Visual Studio has been designed to cater to the developer, Expression Blend has been built for the designer. As you’ve seen, Silverlight does a fantastic job of separating the appearance and logic of an application, so developers and designers can work side by side. ASP.NET took a few strides toward achieving this separation, but it still fell short in many ways. I think you will find that Silverlight has reached a new layer in this separation, making it much more practical for designers and developers to truly work in parallel in designing applications.