Microsoft Expression Blend Unleashed

Microsoft Expression Blend (formerly code-named Interactive Designer) is a brand new technology from Microsoft. It is a design tool for creating rich user interfaces in both Windows and Web based applications. It will bring a whole new dimension to the application development process. This will be one of the first books on Expression Blend, and will be essential reading for any developer who wants to get up to speed quickly on this new tool. The author assumes that the reader is already familiar with the basics of .NET development, and shows how Blend fits into the whole .NET 3.0 universe of tools, especially with Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML. (Blend is essentially a WYSIWYG front-end for WPF and XAML.) The author also shows developers how to understand and appreciate the work a designer can do with this new UI design tool. This will help designers better understand their working lifecycle, and help them to integrate UI design as a seamless part of the application development lifecycle. In short, developers who have never touched any other design tools (such as Flash) will be lost when they need to write a new application using .NET 3.0. They will need this book to learn this new approach.