Top 10 Features
SketchFlow — Revolutionize the speed you can prototype your vision for an application
SketchFlow, a feature in Expression Ultimate, enables you to rapidly present ideas, user interface flows, screen layouts and application functionality to your clients with an effective prototype. Convey your ideas through informal drawings and ‘sketchy’ styled components that help your client focus on the functionality of the prototype rather than the detail, while the SketchFlow player gives your client the opportunity to test the prototype and give feedback, which can be viewed directly in-context on the design surface in Blend. SketchFlow prototypes are real WPF or Silverlight projects so once the design is finalized you have a simple choice. How much of the prototype do you want to reuse? Do you want to simply throw the prototype away, or use individual elements from the prototype such as a resource library or Behavior, or carry the complete prototype forward into production? The choice is yours.
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator import — Utilize your traditional design assets
Expression Blend includes powerful importers for both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator enabling smooth integration with the workflow visual designers are using today. During import you have the freedom to view and import Photoshop files layer by layer. Layers can be easily regrouped and elements retain their original formats; layers, layer positions, editable text and vectors.
Behaviors — Enable interactivity without writing code
Behaviors are powerful building blocks of interactivity that bring a project to life by adding control of interactivity, animation and transitions to your applications. Developers can encapsulate complex interaction models and ideas into reusable production ready Behaviors, which can then be visually finessed through the property inspector without writing code. GoToStateAction, ChangePropertyAction, MultiTouch, conditional actions, adding physics and MouseDrag are perfect examples of Behaviors that can easily be shared amongst your design and development teams to ensure consistency, reduce duplication of effort and allow teams to maximize innovation.
Sample Data — Accelerate the creation of effective UI with sample data
Today designing effective user experiences will always involve leveraging customized data. Accelerate the speed and flexibility you can create your application designs through the effective use of sample data. Reduce your costs by using appropriate sample data by highlighting UI issues early in the design process and avoid triggering costly user interface redesigns late in the development process. Design time sample data can be generated on the fly, imported via XML or created from C# objects provided by a developer and then seamlessly swapped by for a live data connection for live testing and painless integration with the customer’s production environment.
Visual State Manager — Bring you application to life one transition at a time
Transitions, the change from one application view to another, are what give an application texture and life. As customers expect richer applications it is often the transitions in an application rather the features that define how successful it will be. Whether an element in a control snaps into position or glides, moves in a linear fashion or with inertia, pops, ripples or swirls, the Visual State Manager lets you quickly and accurately experiment with different interaction models before finely tuning and finalizing the appropriate user experience of the application.
Code editing with Intellisense
Expression Blend includes a full code editor with XAML, C# and VB Intellisense. This gives you the choice of editing your code in Expression Blend or Visual Studio, simplifying your workflow by allowing you to use the tool you are most comfortable with.
Styling and Customization — visually style your applications to effectively deliver customized applications
Powerful template editing capabilities allow controls to be rebuilt as a bespoke, reusable controls perfectly designed to fit their purpose. Change the structure of a control, its look, the way it displays its data, you have absolute control over how the user interface looks by working visually on the design surface. Support for Model View View Model (MVVM) provides a streamlined workflow for developers using these types of patterns to structure a Silverlight or Windows Presentation Foundation application ensures that UI objects are as decoupled as possible from the application’s data and behavior. This makes it even easier to work simultaneously on both the user interface and core architecture without one breaking the other to further streamline your workflow.
Modern user interface
The design surface and user interface of Expression Blend has been designed to enable you to work faster, have greater freedom to experiment with ideas and be more productive. Direct selection of objects, powerful design tools, customization of panel layouts, improved and simplified data binding, expanded control over conditional behaviors the interface is continually being improved to help the tool add fuel to the creative process.
Market leading workflow — fast, flexible, seamless, a workflow that adapts to you and your team
Expression Blend, Visual Studio, Silverlight and .NET provide the most impactful and seamless design and development workflow on the market today. Ideas are taken from concept to completion with speed and flexibility, challenging you to deliver innovative applications to your customers with Silverlight and .NET. If you work as part of a larger team Expression Blend provides integration with Team Foundation Server enabling you to keep control of your graphics and code and work seamlessly with the rest of your team.
Platform support — build applications for the most modern and powerful web and desktop platforms
Leverage the full capability of the underlying platforms, Silverlight for cross browser, cross platform deployment and WPF for the ultimate Windows client experience.
Multi-targeting enables you to use Expression Blend to create applications for Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4. This allows you to use many of the new features introduced in Expression Blend 4 to accelerate the delivery of applications on previous platforms.
