Extreme makeover: Microsoft Expression Blend
Posted by meero on December 4, 2006
Microsoft Expression has a special holiday treat for designers: The new beta of Microsoft Expression Blend is now available for download.
The Expression team has been working very hard over the past year to give Sparkle an extreme makeover. New UI, new property inspection system, better workflow for UI design tasks, and a great looking product!
From the Expression Team blog:
“What’s new in the beta?
Enhanced Properties panel UX
- Context-sensitive UX makes finding associated properties a snap
- Improved UX for event & property triggers
- Support for editing almost all WPF properties such as bitmap effects
- Built-in search to help you find properties without the need for scrolling
- Ability to bind data such as a brush resource to any property using a rich UX
- Unique value editors make it easier to set values without leaving the mouse
- New editors for collections
- A new plug-in model that 3rd-parties can use to add their own custom editors
Redesigned shell
- Improved docking and panel management
- New icons enhance usability
- Darker theme brings focus to the design workspace
Improved artboard
- Drag & drop to create elements via a rich asset gallery
- Snap to grid and snap to alignment makes it easier to layout your controls
- Enhanced context menu allows you to group into layout containers and set common layout properties
- Right-click > View XAML allows you to quickly find the associated XAML for an element
Improved resource management & control template capabilities
- Resources panel allows you to edit resource values used by your project
- Support for dragging & dropping resources between dictionaries to re-factor your project
- Built-in set of controls which are designed to be easy to edit and reconfigure
Support for Microsoft Visual Studio editing
- Shared project format with Visual Studio allows easier development-designer workflow
- Create event handlers in Expression Blend and edit your code in Visual Studio”
Give it a test drive, and send your comments.
Amir
February 8, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Hey Amir, as always great info about WPF and Expression on your blog. I wanted to let you know about a WPF/WPFE centric design group that is forming here in Michigan, aimed at designers and the programmers that interact with designers..
Anyway thanks and keep those great articles coming..
-Don Burnett (don@donburnett.com)
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You are invited to attend the inaugural meeting of a new group
(MIDaS)
Michigan’s
Interactive
Designers
and
Software Development
Date: February 27, 2007
Time: 6:30PM
Location:
Frenchie’s
56 E. Cross St.
Ypsilanti,MI
Phone: (734) 483-5230
The group’s focus is Interactive Design for the Microsoft Interactive designers who are looking to design great user experiences:
Our first meeting will feature:
• An overview of Expression Web (featuring a walkthru of it’s features and creating a website). Expression Web is a new Microsoft product, centered around design using web standards.
• Cool applications created with Expression Blend (Microsoft’s WPF Interactive Design Program)
• A look at designer’s already using Expression and the applications they are creating.
• Metalliq.com’s Snowboard WPF Application (3D, Video, and GPS integration)
• The Otto Online Shopping Experience (a WPF 2d/3D shopping app from the folks who own Crate and Barrel).
• A look at the WPF Design Process
• A review of the WPF/E cross-platform February CTP and discusssion about adding WPF/E video to your website and a discussion of the VC-1 high definition video codec that can be used with WPF/E.
• Open Question and Answer session for people wishing to enhance their design skills. We will with audience participation attempt to answer questions on popular topics like Photoshop, Expression Design, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe Flex, Xaml, XML, and others.
Please note while the meeting is free to attend Frenchie’s is donating space for the meeting and will be offering food and drink for the meeting for sale. We’d like to get an idea if you are attending or not so we can appropriately reserve enough space. please email us to let us know you are attending:
midas.g@hotmail.com
We highly recommend that you come to the meeting and order something for yourself to eat or drink at the meeting so that we can keep the meeting space available to us for future meetings for free for the group. The food from SideTrack/Frenchies is great and they have a world famous burger that just can’t be beat.
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