About Expression Blend

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About Expression Blend

Microsoft Expression Blend is a full-featured professional design tool for creating engaging and sophisticated user interfaces for Microsoft Windows-based and Microsoft Silverlight-based applications. By separating project files by role, Expression Blend lets designers focus on creativity and developers focus on programming. Each team member can work without blocking the other's progress.

How does Expression Blend work?

In Expression Blend, you design your application visually, drawing shapes, paths, and controls on the artboard, and then modifying their appearance and behavior. You can import images, video, and sound. In Windows-based applications, you can also import and change 3D objects.

You can create storyboards that animate the visual or audio elements of your design, and optionally trigger those storyboards when users interact with your application. When you work on Windows-based or Silverlight 2-based applications, you can redesign the templates that are applied to basic controls so that your application looks and behaves uniquely.


Silverlight 2 is supported in Expression Blend 2 with Service Pack 1 installed.

When you work on your application, you can update your project at any time with code-behind files or custom control files that programmers are working on.


What other tools work with Expression Blend?

You can import graphics and Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) resources that are generated by Microsoft Expression Design 2 into your Expression Blend 2 project. You can also import Silverlight media projects that were created in Microsoft Expression Encoder 2, to add new features or visual elements to the project, or to modify the media player template that can be reused in Expression Encoder 2.

In Microsoft Expression Web 2, you can import Silverlight 1.0 websites and compiled Silverlight 2 application files into an existing or new project, and then publish your work.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 works seamlessly with Expression Blend 2 to automatically update code-behind files in your project when you specify events to listen for. From the Project panel in Expression Blend 2, you can open individual code-behind files or your whole project. You can also use the deployment tools of Visual Studio 2008 to deploy your applications.

What does Expression Blend produce?

Expression Blend produces Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications, Silverlight 1.0 websites, and Silverlight 2 user controls (.xap and supporting files). Your visual design is represented by XAML. Just as HTML is the markup language for web applications, XAML is the markup language for WPF.