What is Expression Blend?
Expression Blend, Visual Studio, Silverlight and .NET provide the most compelling and seamless design and development workflow on the market today. Rapidly iterate on both the user experience and core architecture, evolving your ideas quickly from initial prototype through to completed project.
Key components of Expression Blend, including Behaviors, Visual State Manager, transition effects, and SketchFlow (Expression Blend 4 includes SketchFlow in Expression Studio 4 Ultimate product only), coupled with the speed and flexibility of this modern workflow challenge you to push boundaries and work beyond the limits of what you thought possible.
Compelling Experiences
Build rich and compelling applications without compromise for the desktop and the web.
Expression Blend enables you to take full advantage of the underlying power of the platform. Rapid prototyping without writing code, 3D transformations, and pixel effects, such as blur, glow, ripple, are just some the features that enable the exploration of ideas and concepts that simply weren’t practical before.
Delivering a custom control or heavily customized application? No problem. Expression Blend makes the delivery of custom applications and user experiences possible in realistic timeframes. Visually edit the template of a control easily on the design surface, redesigning it to perfectly fulfill the function it will play within an application.
Complex interaction models and ideas can be encapsulated into simple reusable elements called Behaviors. These can then be tweaked visually in Expression Blend to give the exact interaction you need for maximum impact of a particular feature or element. Behaviors can be created and shared amongst your team to ensure consistency, reduce duplication of effort, and allow you to maximize on innovation.
Accelerated Results
Expression Blend breaks down the barriers between design and development to accelerate your development process.
Rapidly demonstrate ideas, user interface flows, screen layouts, and application functionality to your client through a SketchFlow prototype. Use components styled as though they were ‘sketched,’ as well as informal drawings to convey initial concepts. Get feedback from the client through the SketchFlow player directly, in-context on the design surface, enabling a powerful and actionable conversation to take place with your client.
The SketchFlow prototype is a real WPF or Silverlight project 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 throw the prototype away, 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.
Powerful Technology
Utilizing industry proven technologies Silverlight, WPF, XAML, C# and VB, Expression Blend enables you to deliver applications that are stable, scalable, accessible, reliable, and highly secure, while maintaining optimum performance.
The strengths of great user experience and robust core architecture are brought together with the combined power of Expression Blend and Visual Studio, enabling the accelerated delivery of applications through XAML and the Microsoft platform.
Design innovative data driven applications by connecting the interface of your application to backend business services and databases through the advanced data binding capabilities in Expression Blend. Design time sample data can be generated on the fly, imported via XML, or created from C# objects provided by a developer.
Bringing these data driven applications to life has never been easier. The ability to encapsulate complex interactions into reusable drag and drop Behaviors gives you the freedom to freely experiment with ideas and finesse the details to deliver impactful applications for your clients.
The .NET platform allows you to maximize the investments you’ve already made in training your teams, as well as leveraging the other tools and technologies you employ today, whether you work visually (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator) or in code (C#, VB).
Choose platforms and tools that can deliver on your vision.
Expression Blend, Visual Studio, Silverlight and .NET provide the most impactful design and development workflow on the market today. Ideas are taken from concept to completion with speed and flexibility, challenging you to deliver sophisticated and compelling applications for your customers with Silverlight and .NET.
