I spent the summer and fall in the Silverlight world and it became apparent to me that the designer and developer worlds are converging. With the emergence of Expression Blend 3 designers visually create  XAML using Blend’s States and Properties panels. This XAML can be VERY long and verbose but the results when applied to [...]

[updated 7/12/09 to Silverlight 3 RTW] One of the very cool features of Flex that I miss in Silverlight is Scale 9. Sure Silverlight is vector based and if you resize your browser or a container inside your application, vector artwork scales perfectly. But chances are your designer will give you a comp to reproduce [...]

If you do anything half way expressive in the Blend artboard and then switch over to XAML view you may be taken aback by the sheer size of the XAML produced. Its easy to conclude that this large file size will relate to slow, unresponsive applications but that is not necessarily the case. I have [...]

I need one of those Sherlock Holmes hats, with a brim on both the front and the back as I try to cover the RIA space to be in a position to make a buck off either Flex or Silverlight as work presents itself (I could just turn the hat around as needed). I’m both [...]

I know my eyesight is not the best after looking at CRTs for 30 years but to me the lack of contrast between text and background in the Expression Blend UI is painful. My laptop is not the latest but Blend is the only application I use where I have to resort to a 26 [...]

In order to have behaviors show up in the Assets Tool so you can apply them to content on the artboard, you need to add a reference to a DLL containing the behaviors (after all they are created in code). Blend 3 Beta 1 ships with Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.dll which is located in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Blend [...]