Today at Internet Week in NYC, we announced the availability of Expression Studio 4. You can download the trial of Expression Studio 4 Ultimate that includes Expression Blend 4 and SketchFlow by clicking below:

Expression Studio 4 Ultimate

Keep watching this blog for more news, updates, and in-depth looks at some of the new features that we’ve introduced. Until then, here are some related links:

1. Microsoft Expression home page
2. Christian Schormann’s blog
3. Soma’s Favorite Expression Studio 4 Features

Note that if you are currently doing Windows Phone development, please do not upgrade to the final version of Expression Blend 4 yet. We will release an updated version of all of our phone components in the future, so please continue using Expression Blend 4 RC.

Of course, no major release would be possible without the feedback all of you have provided, so thank you!

- Expression Blend Team

While the PathListBox control provides an easy way to lay out items along a path, creating a carousel control that appears 3 dimensional and has smooth scrolling requires additional functionality that we did not have time to do in Expression Blend 4. I’ve created the PathListBoxUtils sample available on CodePlex to provide the tools that make creating a carousel like the one shown below very easy:

Visit the Carousel tutorial to see how to create this example, and you can view all PathListBoxUtils-related tutorials here on .toolbox.

Happy scrolling!

Joanna

A few weeks ago, a couple of Expression Blend team members presented at the TechEd conference held in New Orleans this year!

You can view those sessions given by Unni/Alan and Dave below:

You can browse through all of the sessions by clicking here.

Cheers,
Kirupa =)

Creating great looking and functioning applications is tough. It requires having a good eye for design, but it also requires some technical knowledge about how to make the design functional.

As you can probably guess, it is our goal to help you use Expression Blend, Visual Studio, and our related tools to create those great applications. We spend a great deal of time adding new features and making existing features better to help you do just that. Making improvements to the applications is only one side of how we try to help you create great applications, however.

The other side involves helping you better understand how to actually create great applications, and we try our best to provide some valuable training resources. Some notable shoutouts include the .toolbox and the Expression Community sites. While looking at videos or reading tutorials is useful, we wanted to go further and also provide you with a library of xaml+code samples that showcase something small, something specific, something cool. We felt that, in many cases, simply being able to deconstruct how something was done can be equally (if not more useful) in learning how to do something.

This library of xaml+code snippets, known better by its friends and family as the Pattern Library, lives as an extension to the Expression Gallery:

You can learn more about the Pattern Library by reading Lars Power’s newsletter article introducing it.

Please feel free to download and play with the patterns. If there is something you feel is missing, please feel to let us know or just create it yourself and upload it.

Cheers,
Kirupa =)