Some fairly exciting news today on the release of various components of the Expression suite in one form or another.

I'm looking forward to trying out the Media bits and updating the other stuff (Design and Web) I had recently.

I've actually been using Blend for a couple of months and it is certainly a big improvement on EID. IMHO, particular improvements are:

• UI is more intuitive and not split into many widgets like EID was.
• There's a whole lot more capability - template editing and so on.
• The control paradigms are clever - input, or drag gestures to change values on a lot of them, and the useful square dot on the right for accessing binding/resource options followed by the subsequent colour coding.
• The events and triggers controls operate better.

All in all, I feel that I could trust Blend to deliver a project for me. With EID, I felt I had 'partial trust' and had to keep my wits about me to make sure that I wasn't being counterproductive.

On WPF/E, I'm particularly excitied. We really need to take this tech on a test drive as there are a whole load of potential scenarios. I haven't used it beyond gaining an understanding of capability, so it's all new! I've been involved in a lot of WPF developments over the past few months from a thick-ish client point of view, so it'll be interesting to use WPF/E to extend some XAML goodness into the browser.