Expression Answers

At Mix07 today, Microsoft announced that Expression Blend has gone RTM.  Amazon.com is now taking pre-orders for the software and it will soon be available for purchase in stores.  The estimated retail price will be $499 (although the Amazon.com price is showing $459). 

Expression Blend will also be available soon in the Expression Studio package which also includes Expression Web, Design and Media and has an ERP of $599.  A quick check at Amazon.com shows that they are selling it for $559 and it will be available on March 21st.  According to Microsoft's website, Expression Studio also includes Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition, (although I don't see any mention of Visual studio on Amazon's page for Expression Studio). 

Also available for download is the first preview of Expression Blend 2. This version can create Silverlight-based applications.  The download is available here

Several interesting Expression and Silverlight webcasts are now available on Microsoft's Expression website

This week Microsoft released a newer version of Expression Blend.  The Beta 2 version is now available for download here.  Some of the changes for this version include:

• You can now instantiate resources from the Resources panel. For example, you can drag and drop a button style onto the artboard and create a button out of it instead of creating a button and applying it as a separate task.
• You can see inner exceptions when an exception happens on the design surface, allowing you to see more details about the cause of an exception.
• You now get font previews in the Text category of the Properties panel which makes it easier to choose your font.
• After adding an event handler, the XAML file is now automatically saved for you.
• Configuring value editors has been improved. For example, you'll find editing BitmapEffects or adding items to an ItemsControl such as ContextMenu are now much easier to do.