Expression Blend provides a high quality importer for both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, enabling you to continue using the graphic design tools you are already familiar with.

The graphics you import can easily be integrated into the user interface of the application, turned into real UI controls such as sliders, buttons, and other UI elements, made interactive, animated or databound into dynamic UI elements.

You important thing to know is that you remain in control of your graphics from start to finish which means they end up looking exactly as you intended.

Being able to explore your ideas quickly and effectively is important to finding the right solution for your client.

SketchFlow is a rapid prototyping tool where you can quickly map out UI flows and explore ideas early in the design process. The lo-fidelity sketch styled components enable clients to concentrate on the functionality of your solution rather than getting caught up in the detail of the design. Clients can view, review and provide feedback on your prototypes easily using the free SketchFlow player.

Using prototypes to find issues early in the development process means it’s quicker, easier and cheaper to make and test changes and ensures you can deliver appropriate results for your clients.

Behaviors enable you to quickly add interactivity to your designs. In fact you can think of Behaviors as building blocks of interactivity. Behaviors are flexible allowing you to add a lot of different functionality to your application including navigation, responding to mouse up/down and drag actions, trigger events by simply dragging and dropping your Behavior to the design surface.

You can download additional Behaviors adding powerful capabilities such as a real-time physics engine that includes capabilities such as gravity and friction or a Behavior that understands mouse gestures – all without writing any code.

Visual Studio leverages the rich user experiences, created in Expression Blend; there is no conversion needed, no recreation of graphics in code, you can simply start coding directly against the UI. This workflow is made possible through the consistent use of XAML across our tools and platforms. XAML provides the separation of code from the look and feel of an application, enabling us to deliver a modern and effective workflow.

Expression Blend enables you to have a different view of your projects, literally turning a project on its head and giving you the capability to look and solve problems from a user experience point of view.

Expression Blend includes a full code editor with XAML, C# and VB intellisense which means you no longer need to switch applications to write something as simple as an Event handler. Instead you can choose to write your code in either Expression Blend or Visual Studio. Decide on a workflow that works for you and your team, minimizing application switching and maximizing your time to be creative in code.

You can encapsulate complex interactions as reusable code chunks called Behaviors which can then be applied easily to objects via drag and drop. The way a Behavior works can be altered at design time without affecting the underlying architecture of the application by changing properties you have exposed through the Blend UI. This allows designers and developers to work in a collaborative way helping each other to deliver a better user experience.

The ability to seamlessly switch between visual and code centric tools enables you to experiment with different ideas and solutions to development problems without the tools getting in the way. An implementation issue can easily be solved by looking at the problem from a different viewpoint. This flexible workflow leads to creative solutions being found simply wouldn’t be possible with more constrained workflows.

Expression Blend includes high quality importers for both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator enabling you to continue using graphic design tools you’re already familiar with. At import you can preview your graphics and decide which Photoshop layers you want to bring into Blend. Layers are easily regrouped and merged without affecting the original Photoshop file and after import individual elements retain their original formats; text, bitmaps, vectors and masks.

Imported graphics can easily be integrated into the user interface of an application, turned into real UI controls such as sliders, buttons, and other UI elements, made interactive, animated or databound into dynamic UI elements.

You remain in total control from start to finish so your graphics end up exactly as you intended.

The ability to explore your ideas quickly and effectively is important to finding the right solution for your client.

SketchFlow is a rapid prototyping tool where you can quickly map out UI flows and explore ideas early in the design process. The lo-fidelity sketch styled components enable clients to concentrate on the functionality of your solution rather than getting caught up in the detail of the design. Clients can view, review and provide feedback on your prototypes easily using the free SketchFlow player.

Using prototypes to find issues early in the development process means it’s quicker, easier and cheaper to make and test changes.

You need to be able to think freely to get your work done quickly and efficiently. Your design tools should allow you to rapidly explore ideas, try new concepts and present you with options to explore rather than issues to avoid, enabling you to work in the way that best suits you and your team.

Silverlight, Expression Blend, Visual Studio and SketchFlow have been built specifically to provide a modern and flexible working environment that enables you to deliver quickly and accurately on your original concepts. From the underlying XAML that provides a seamless workflow to the multi-threaded Silverlight player that delivers incredible performance, our aim is simple, to work with you to create great applications.

With Silverlight and Expression Blend we have focused on speed of innovation across tools, workflow and delivery platform, concentrating on getting these improvements in the hands of our users as quickly as possible. Four tools and platform releases in four years ensure you are able to develop with the latest technologies and techniques.

Being able to explore your ideas quickly and effectively is important to finding the right solution for your client.

Use SketchFlow to rapidly map out UI flows and explore options and ideas early in the design process. The lo-fidelity sketch styled components enable clients to concentrate on the functionality of your solution rather than getting caught up in the detail of the design. They can view, review and provide feedback on your prototypes easily using the free browser based SketchFlow player.

Using prototypes to find issues early in the development process means it’s quicker, easier and cheaper to make and test changes and ensures there is less churn in the development cycle and what gets delivered meets the clients expectations.

• Snapflow reduced development time by 40% with Expression Blend and Silverlight.
• Infospace chose Silverlight over Flash and cut development time from 6-8 weeks to just 2.

At present there are over six million .NET developers worldwide who can all continue using their existing development skills to build applications for WPF and Silverlight. Designers using traditional design tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator are able to integrate easily into the workflow, through the high quality import capabilities of Expression Blend.

“Anything we can dream, we can do – without being limited by the tools.” ISC – Mapping Solutions

“In eight hours, I was able to deliver a working application for review. A year ago, the same task would have taken days or weeks.” I.S. Consulting

“The flexibility of the Microsoft development tools has enabled us to create a more compelling and intuitive user experience.” Blockbuster

Our tools and platforms allow your development team to consistently work to their strengths and enable you to deliver better results for your clients and stakeholders.