Expression Blend and Design

One of the things that we are planning on doing is providing easier access to learning content. Besides the influx of learning content (videos, articles, etc.) we will be generating ourselves, we also want to link to content around the web that many of you like as well.

Please comment below on sites, blogs, etc. that you have found very useful for learning more about Expression Blend. In the future, I will create a follow-up post that will hopefully act as a central location we can point individuals to if they want to learn how to use Expression Blend.

Thanks,
Kirupa

You’re probably very familiar with Content in WPF and Silverlight. For example, two Buttons can use the same Template but can look different by virtue of having different Content in them. And the Content property is of type object so it can be Text, or an Image, or a Panel containing yet more elements, or anything else. In the Template, the uncertainty of what the Content might be is taken care of by the ContentPresenter element which is analogous to a TV screen showing whatever Content happens to be in the control instance.
This generality of Content is a good thing. But it does give rise to an issue in scenarios where you would like your Template (or Skin, if you prefer) to alter some aspect of the Content in a visual state. Say you’d like the Content’s Stroke color to animate to red during MouseOver. Naturally, that requirement only makes sense as long as the Content has a Stroke property.

A safe, but limited, solution is to make use of the small number of properties that ContentPresenter has. For example, in WPF, the Template might respond to an IsMouseOver Trigger by animating the ContentPresenter’s OpacityMask to Red. Then the Templated control instance could bind some property of its Content to that OpacityMask like this:

That approach is limited because you soon run out of ContentPresenter properties. Another approach is for the Template to make assumptions about what will be in the the Templated control instance’s Content. You can try this in a Silverlight 2 project in the Blend 2.5 June Preview. Draw a Button and then draw a Path into the Button’s Content. Then edit a copy of the Button’s Template, select the MouseOver state, select the ContentPresenter and change its Background to Red. Now you’ll need to do some XAML editing. In the XAML, find the MouseOver state and the Background animation and change the Storyboard.TargetProperty attribute’s value to "(ContentPresenter.Content).(Shape.Stroke).(SolidColorBrush.Color)".

Build and run and you’ll see the result. This is flexible, but it is also unsafe in the sense that if a control instance uses your Template without satisfying the Template’s assumptions (say its Content is a TextBlock instead of a Shape) then a run-time error will result. However, so long as you’re careful to only use this Template on control instances whose Content is a Shape then you’ll be fine.

Corrina Barber came up with a scenario which is not addressed by the above approaches. The scenario is that of a Button which, in its Normal state, shows a still image (say, vector art of the MSN butterfly) and, in its MouseOver state, shows an animation (say, an image sequence or video of the butterly exercising its wings). Naturally, each Button instance should be able to specify the Normal and the MouseOver Content. This can’t be done by simply animating existing types’ properties in states so in this post I’ll show some of the principles of my solution to that requirement.

I wrote a fairly simple subclass of ContentControl and I called it FlipContent:

The value proposition of the FlipContent type is that it can be made to flip its Content in reponse to a property change, therefore it can be made to flip its Content in reponse to a state change in a control template. Further, the Template needs to know nothing about the objects which constitute the FlipContent’s Content; the control instance contains those:

You can try this in a Silverlight 2 project in the Blend 2.5 June Preview. Paste the class definition given above into Page.xaml.cs then add the Button XAML above. Then edit a copy of the Button’s Template, select the MouseOver state, select the ContentPresenter and change its Opacity to 50%. Now you’ll need to do some XAML editing. In the XAML, find the MouseOver state and the Opacity animation and change the Storyboard.TargetProperty attribute’s value to "(ContentPresenter.Content).(local:FlipContent.IsFlipped)". Now press F5 to test the result. You experiment with different content, and you will be able to use Blend to add and edit UnflippedContent because it is the default content property. But you won’t get as much help with FlippedContent.

You can download the project source files from below:

Download Project Files

Please note that the solution to Corrina’s exact requirement (switching an image for some video) will probably call for a FlipMediaElementSource class which assumes its content is a MediaElement and which switches its Source property instead of its own Content property. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader – you maybe!

-Steve

Karen Corby is the Program Manager who worked with the Expression Blend team in developing the Visual State Manager feature. Karen has written four excellent and comprehensive blog posts (starting here) which explain the motivation for VSM, everything you can do with VSM and how it works under the covers, and how to build and skin a custom control. Even if you won't be writing your own custom control, this is highly recommended material on the subject from someone who designs the platform itself.

Below I've shamelessly copied out Karen's further reading section so we have a good set of links in one place:

• Karen Corby's VSM Posts (Program Manager for Silverlight)
• Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
• Christian Schormann’s Blog (Group Program Manager for Expression Blend)
  • Creating Control Skins with Visual State Manager - An Introduction
  • Visual State Manager: Goals
  • Visual State Manager for User Controls: A Simple Chord Finder Example
• Steve White’s video tutorials (Program Manager for Expression Blend)
  • Expression tutorials
• Celso Gomes’s tutorials (Designer for Expression Blend)
  • http://www.nibblestutorials.net/
• Tim Heuer’s Blog (Senior Program Manager on the .NET Developer Platform)
  • Skinning Silverlight controls just got easier
  • Silverlight and the VisualStateManager
• Scott Guthrie’s Blog (Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division)
  • Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released
• Jesse Liberty's tutorials (Senior Program Manager on the .NET Developer Platform)
• Styles, Templates and VisualStateManager

 -Steve White

If you’ve browsed through the Deep Zoom Composer forums lately, you will have seen a few cases where Deep Zoom Composer was having difficulties maintaining layout when exporting collections. More specifically, the arrangement and position of images seen inside Deep Zoom Composer was not what you saw when you previewed your collection in your browser.

If this describes the handful of you who were having difficulties, we have a manual solution for you until we release our next version of Deep Zoom Composer. The solution is for you to open your dzc_output.xml file in Notepad and do a find/replace on all instances of commas ‘,’ with periods ‘.’ instead:

Save your dzc_output.xml file, and you should be set!

The problem is that in certain locales, commas are used to indicate precision as opposed to decimal units. Replacing the commas with periods will take care of this issue for you. In the next release of Deep Zoom Composer, we will take care of this automatically so you don’t have to worry about it.

Credit for finding the cause of the problem and the possible solution goes to Avi Dunn and Rado Nickolov of the Live Labs team.

Cheers!
Kirupa :)

A great site that covers designer-oriented Expression Blend topics is Celso Gomes’s Nibbles Tutorials site:

This all-Silverlight site features some nice articles on how you can use Blend to create WPF, Silverlight 1, and Silverlight 2 applications. He recently updated it cover the new features in Blend 2.5 such as the Visual State Manager, so if you’ve been itching to learn more about it, head on over to his site.

Cheers!
Kirupa

It’s not entirely uncommon for projects that run fine to not work when loaded into Blend for editing:

There are a variety of issues that can cause this- some are bugs that we’re working to address, others are things that need to be fixed by the application developer. Unfortunately designability doesn’t always come free.

The exception information that’s displayed often has some useful information, but for complex projects I can save some guessing by just debugging through it using VS. This post will describe some steps to help you out.

Steps to Debug Exceptions on the Design Surface in Blend

1. Open the project with the error in Blend, but close the XAML file which contains the error.
    
2. Open the same project in Visual Studio.
    
3. Attach the VS debugger to the Blend process:
   
   1. In Visual Studio, go to Debug->Attach to Process.
       
   2. Select Blend.exe from the Available Processes list:

3. Ensure that the “Attach To:” field reads ‘Managed Code’, if not, click Select… and change it to “Managed Code”

4. Click Attach
    
4. Set Visual Studio to break on all exceptions:
   1. In Visual Studio, go to Debug->Exceptions…
       
   2. Ensure there’s a checkbox beside Common Language Runtime Exceptions:

3. Click “OK” 
    
   
5. Go back to Blend, and open up the XAML file containing the error.
   
6. What ideally will happen is that you’ll get a nice stack trace leading to some of your code in Visual Studio and the cause is readily apparent:

Common Examples of Errors We See
Let’s look at some common errors we often encounter with Silverlight 2 projects:

Common Error
Accessing the web page while in the design surface, such as the above example. Anything related to HtmlPage is off-limits when in design time since the app is not being hosted in a web page:

if (HtmlPage.IsEnabled) {
    HtmlPage.Window.Alert("Hello World!");
}

Common Error
Accessing isolated storage in the design surface, or even accessing a method which contains a call to isolated storage. When hosted at design-time the Silverlight application is actually running on the desktop .NET runtime where these APIs do not exist. This means that methods which contain a call to isolated storage cannot be called even if the isolated storage is never accessed.

Bad:

public Page() {
    InitializeComponent();

    if (HtmlPage.IsEnabled) {
        using (Stream s =
                      IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication()
                                         .CreateFile("testdata")) {
        }
}

Good:

public Page() {
        InitializeComponent();
 
    if (HtmlPage.IsEnabled)
        this.InitializeData();
}

public void InitializeData() {
       using (Stream s = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication()
                                            .CreateFile("testdata")) {
       }
}

Bonus Trick
One of the other complaints that I’ve heard frequently is that debugging templates errors in Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is not so easy. Too often you just get a stack trace with a bunch of nonsense calls to Measure or MeasureOverride. To help debug these errors in my own projects I’ve started overriding MeasureOverride in my own controls so that they’ll appear in the stack trace as well. This way when a template fails to load, I can quickly tell where it was in the application.

Hope this helps!

- Pete Blois

Many of you may not know that Expression Blend (and the entire Expression Studio) is available in eight languages other than English. In fact, we just released them earlier today! Here is a small screenshot of Expression Blend running Japanese:

My name is Marco, and I help to create the versions of these products that ship in Japanese, German, Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese (simplified and traditional).  Creating the international versions of our products is a challenging process that requires several steps, so let’s take a brief look through them in this post.

In order to create our international versions, we first need to be sure our products are globalized so that they can be adapted to different markets around the world where we sell our products.  Once our products are globalized properly, we test them via a pseudo localization process.  In this process, we introduce different kinds of characters into our UI strings to ensure that our application behaves as we expect it to regardless of which character set is used.

To see why, let’s look at the strings in the English version of the Expression Blend options dialog:

Notice the size of the various text fields and how much space each piece of text takes. Now, let’s look at the corresponding Japanese version:

Notice that in the Japanese version, the amount of space your text takes up varies a bit from the English version. This is important, because, as a designer/developer of an app that needs to be localized, you need to ensure that any control that stores localizable strings will still look OK when the strings inside them are of various sizes as you see above. This is where pseudo localization comes in handy. While we may not have the exact translated strings to use, we have a good idea of whether the user interface can handle the text of various sizes when the pseudo localization process throws random text of various sizes.

Once we are convinced that our code is fully localizable, I work with our developers to isolate all of the visible user interface strings within the application.  This includes all of the menus, dialogs, error messages, etc.  If a string can be seen in the UI, then I need to be able to access it.  I then work with software localization specialists to translate the UI strings.

After the strings get translated, we create the localized versions of our applications.  These applications are then tested for both linguistic accuracy as well as functional quality.

As you know, we are always looking for feedback on our products, and this includes our international versions.  Feel free to leave a comment here if you have used any of the localized versions of Expression, or if there is something more you would like to see from our international versions.

Alternately, feel free to contact me directly at marcoda[at]microsoft.com.

Thanks,

Marco D’Amico

Yesterday, we released another update to Deep Zoom Composer, and you can download it for free from the following location:

Download Deep Zoom Composer

In case you are not familiar with this app, Deep Zoom Composer (DZC) allows you take images, arrange them on a design surface, and export them for use with the Deep Zoom technology found in Silverlight 2. You can see a really impressive demo at Hard Rock Cafe’s Memoribilia site where they use Deep Zoom to show you a lot of high-resolution imagery. You can create something similar using your own images with DZC.

This update sports a lot of cool features besides just supporting the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 changes, so for the rest of this post, let’s take a look at these new features.

XML Support
One of the big changes we made was replacing the old BIN file formats with an XML-based file format instead (dzc_output.xml):

EDIT: Picture updated on June 9th to refer to correct XML file.

This means that your MultiScaleImage control will no longer work when you set its Source property to a BIN file. It has to be the new XML-based file, but don’t worry, Deep Zoom Composer takes care of those details for you. The project template we export provides all of the hooks necessary for you to have a working Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application without you doing anything extra.

Thanks to Avi Dunn, Lutz Gerhard, Dan Cory, and Radoslav Nickolov of the Live Labs team for making these changes to both the encoder as well as the MultiScaleImage control.

Image Importing Changes, Quality Settings, Transparent PNG Support
In previous versions, when you imported an image, we flattened everything down to a JPEG whose quality was 95. While that seems like a pretty good tradeoff, it does not help when you are importing a transparent PNG or a lossless format where quality really matters. In this version, we respect whatever file format your input image is in. If it is a JPEG or PNG, we encode it as a JPEG or PNG on the design surface. If it is some other lossless format, we pick the appropriate lossless format for you.

When exporting, you can now pick between JPEG or PNG, and if you picked JPEG, you have the ability to adjust the image quality:

We are not providing support for image formats beyond PNG and JPEG because we are only supporting the image types Silverlight 2 currently supports.

Undo and Redo
You now have the ability to Undo and Redo any action you perform on the artboard:

Use the Edit menu or the standard Ctrl + Z and Ctrl + Y key combinations for performing Undo and Redo respectively.

Simplified Auto-Grid Arrangement
To quickly help you arrange your images on the artboard, we introduced some cool snapping and guideline functionality in our previous version. Now, if you want to bypass manual arrangement altogether, you can arrange your images into a grid! Simply select multiple images, right click, and select Arrange into a Grid from the Arrange menu:

This will allow you to constrain your arrangement by either rows or columns:

All that said, the big takeaway is that you now have a very quick and easy way of arranging all of your images into a grid:

While the above example only shows same-sized images being arranged, you can work with images of varying sizes as well.

Support for Tagging
When working with collections, having a way to filter your images would be useful. Many of you were modifying your SparseImageSceneGraph XML file by adding extra nodes to represent metadata. To help with this, we are now providing tagging functionality within the UI itself:

Select an image or a group of images, and set the tags you want on them. When you export, we now output an XML file called Metadata that contains your image details, its zorder, as well as any tags you set on it:

This file closely mimics your SparseImageSceneGraph, so you can use Silverlight 2’s support for LINQ to quickly parse the XML data and associate tags with the appropriate images. We will provide an example of how to do that in a future post.

Final Remarks
We hope you like these new changes, and if you have any cool features or ideas on what you would like to see in the next version of the app, let us know by commenting below.

Cheers!
Celso, Christian, Janete, Kirupa

Like we mentioned earlier this week, new preview versions of Expression Blend 2.5 and Deep Zoom Composer have been released today. You can download them from the following locations:

	Download Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview
	Download Deep Zoom Composer

Both versions coincide with the launch of Silverlight 2 Beta 2, and they both have some cool new features besides just allowing you to create content targeting the latest version of Silverlight 2.

We’ll have follow-up posts shortly giving you an overview of what some of the new features are. In the meantime, please visit the following page for a summary of the changes and some training videos to help you get started.

Cheers!
Kirupa

EDIT:
The link for Deep Zoom Composer doesn’t seem to be working, so please use the Alternate Link if you are unable to download from the official link.

As many of you may have heard, Bill Gates announced during his TechEd keynote today that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 will be released later this week. To coincide with Silverlight 2 Beta 2, we will be releasing updated versions of Expression Blend 2.5 and Deep Zoom Composer as well.

There are some nifty new tricks up Expression Blend 2.5’s sleeve for this release. One of them is known as the Visual State Manager, or VSM for short, which makes styling your controls easier. To learn more about this feature, visit Christian Schormann’s blog where he provides an overview of Creating Control Skins in the Visual State Manager.

Here is a snippet from Christian’s post on why this is an interesting feature:

Styling dynamic visuals, or “skinning”, is an important task for visual designers working on interactive applications for web and desktops. With Beta 2 of Silverlight, and the associated June preview of Expression Blend, we are making this work much easier and faster - and we are adding more creative options at the same time.

Very importantly, the model does not only work with controls explicitly written to support skinning via templates (such as the built-in and 3rd party controls) - designers can use the same model and tools to easily define dynamic visuals for UserControls they create.

Stay tuned for more updates later on this week when we provide more information on VSM, tutorial videos by Steve White, and an updated version of Blend 2.5 where you can try out the new VSM features for yourself.

Cheers!
Kirupa

Previously on the blog I’ve explained how a KeySpline can be used to do animation easing. I also demonstrated a tool for converting an animation curve (in this case a Path drawn in Blend) into an actual animation.

This time let’s look at the new KeySpline editor in Blend 2 and walk through an example of how to visualize and edit your easing graphically. If you want to follow along, create a new project (WPF or Silverlight) and draw a red-filled circular Ellipse at the top of the page to serve as our falling object. Create a new Storyboard, move the playhead to time 1 and move the Ellipse to the bottom of the page and change its Fill to gray. If you preview the Storyboard now, or build and run, you’ll see the ‘ball’ falls at a steady rate and changes color at a steady rate. Now, what if we want the ball to look like it’s falling under gravity (so, speeding up as it falls) and cooling down from red-hot back to gray (so, cools quickly at first, then more slowly).

In Expression Blend 2 you can actually select a keyframe and edit its KeySpline. The KeySpline is the thing that determines how the animated property changes between the previous keyframe and the keyframe you selected. You can think of each keyframe as being a point on a curve. Each keyframe is connected to the one before it by a segment of this curve. So selecting a keyframe then editing its KeySpline is actually editing the shape of the curve between the selected keyframe and the keyframe before that. Even the first keyframe has a curve going from time 0 to the keyframe (a special case of this is when the first keyframe is at time 0, in which case that curve has no size so editing it will have no  effect).

Let’s see how to edit the KeySpline to get the acceleration and cooling behavior we want. With the Storyboard still open, go to the object tree and expand your ellipse. Now select the keyframe icon on the RenderTransform row by clicking it once:

In the property inspector you’ll see an Easing category inside which is the KeySpline editor. It’s currently a straight line but you can drag the two yellow control point handles around to change that, or use the number editors below to edit the coordinate values more precisely. Make the KeySpline look like the picture below.

Across the top of the KeySpline editor is a little graphic that serves as a reminder for where your selected keyframe lives on the curve you’re editing. I’ve put a red circle around the gray graphic representing your selected keyframe. Remember, the selected keyframe is the one at the end of the curve segment you’re editing. The previous keyframe (or the value at time 0 if you’ve selected the first keyframe) is represented by the lighter keyframe icon graphic at the top-left. So this curve is showing that the animation from the value at time 0 to the value of your selected keyframe makes very little progress in the first half of its duration but then makes up for that towards the end by changing the value very rapidly. Imagine this behavior with respect to the position of a falling ball and then preview your Storyboard, or build and run, to see the new curve in action.

For the cooling effect, you want a differently shaped curve. This time you’re animating from Red to Gray but you want to progress along this animation rapidly at first then slowing down. So select the keyframe on the Fill row and make its KeySpline look like this:

You can create more interesting curves, including inflection points, by moving both control points (the yellow handles). Have fun and please keep the Blend feedback coming.

Steve

Even though we just shipped Expression Blend and Design 2, we are already busy planning what to do for future releases. To better help us with our planning, we'd like to hear from you.

What are some things that you would like to see in Blend and Design? What are some of the things that you wish were done differently? Also, what are some of the things in our products that you like?

Let us know by posting in the comments below! We take your feedback very seriously, and your input goes a long way in helping us improve our products.

Cheers!
Kirupa

(On a related note, based on feedback from many of you, this blog has been restyled. A big thanks to Tim Sneath for the help.)

Ever since we released Deep Zoom Composer during MIX, there has been a ton of great feedback you have all sent us on what you liked and what you would like to see improved in future versions. To give you a sneak peek at where we are currently, we're releasing an updated version of Deep Zoom Composer for you all to play with:

Download the Deep Zoom Composer

Before installing this version, please uninstall earlier versions of Deep Zoom Composer. All of your older projects should still work, so don't worry! Once you have it installed, besides a ton of changes under the hood to make creating your Deep Zoom content faster and more memory-efficient, some of the bigger features that you will immediately notice are the following:

Improved Exporting

The single biggest thing we heard consistently from all of you was to make exporting better. In the earlier version, all we did was just output the image tree. To figure out where you had to go from there, our Composer didn't help. Luckily, you had quality blog postings from individuals such as Scott Hanselman, Pete Blois, Wilfred Pinto, Jaime Rodriguez, and others who helped answer the question "Where to go from here?" In this version of Deep Zoom Composer, we try to make that easier for you by outputting a working Silverlight 2 project along with your image tiles:

Now, you no longer have to worry about what to do with these bizarre cutouts of images that you get as your output, and we even provide all of the mousewheel, pan, zoom, and keyboard functionality that you otherwise had to write yourself!

Better Design Experience

Arranging images can be a time-consuming task. To make it easier for you to do that, we've added snapping and guidelines that appear when you are dragging either a single or a group of images around:

We also took care of the various filling/scaling issues you would have encountered when zooming in on images on the design surface. In case you didn't know, Deep Zoom Composer actually uses a variation of the tiling technology from Deep Zoom on the design surface itself, so we would be swapping images in an out at a frantic pace if you happened to be zooming and panning around while composing your images. We still do that....but it just feels more natural without the distortions you saw earlier.

Updated Collections Export

When exporting collections, Deep Zoom Composer would often misrepresent the position of your arrangements when you actually previewed in our browser. Thanks to the Live Labs team (Lutz, Dan, Avi, and Rado), they were able to pinpoint the problem and fix it for us in this release. You no longer have to worry about what you see in Deep Zoom Composer not being what you saw in the browser.

Greater Access to Help

There will be times when you would need more help than what the application provided. We've tried to call out both our support forum and this blog throughout the application so that you can quickly get unblocked on any issues you run into:

In the past, all of these questions have been handled directly on the blog. For archival purposes, it would be great if you could post those questions on the forums instead. Scanning through several posts with 50+ blog comments for solutions probably isn't fun, and we don't want your question to get lost and go unanswered.

Where Next?

There are still a lot of great features that we will be adding in the future, so if you have any requests, complaints, wishes, etc., please feel free to let us know by posting a comment here or in our Deep Zoom forum on the Expression Forums.

Cheers!
Celso, Janete, Kirupa

In case you missed our announcements and 3rd party coverage, we shipped Expression Studio 2 yesterday! You can download trial versions of all our applications by visiting our Downloads Page!

This post will focus more on Expression Blend and Design, and since Expression Blend ships in its own box as well, check out our cool box design:

Our version 2 release comes around just a year after we shipped version 1, and there have been a slew of new features that we’ve added. Many of you have already played with them through the various previews we’ve released over the past year, but just for fun, I’ve tried to list the ones, in no particular order, that come to my mind:

Support for Visual Studio 2008 and WPF 3.5

Silverlight 1.0 Support with built-in JS Editor

UI Refinements (More incremental search, ability to close panels, etc.)

Storyboard Picker for Managing your Animations

Vertex and Clipping Path Animations

KeySpline Editor for Editing Ease In/Out

SplitView for Seeing your Design as well as the XAML

Importing from Expression Design

Font Subsetting

Design-time Sizing

Easier Ways to Incorporate Media

New WPF and Silverlight Samples

Support for more Object Manipulations (Being able to uniformly scale, resize, and rotate multiple selected elements.)

Breadcrumb Bar

Making and Editing User Controls from the Design Surface

Being able to export Slices in Expression Design

I’m sure there are some that I’ve missed, so be sure to check out the higher-level feature overviews of Expression Blend 2 and Expression Design 2 from our newly re-designed Expression Studio product site.

What are some of your favorite features? What are some of the features you would like to learn more about?

Cheers!
Kirupa :)

Recently, a beta of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 was released. There is currently an incompatibility with Expression Blend/SP1, Expression Blend 2, and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 (whose version number is 2.1.1111.0) where Blend will not work if you have .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta installed.

We currently have a version of Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview (referred to as Blend 2.5 Preview from now on) that fixes this incompatibility, but you will only be able to create and edit WPF and Silverlight 1 projects. While Blend 2.5 Preview will also allow you to create and edit Silverlight 2 projects, they are not supported by Visual Studio at this time.  If you are doing any Silverlight 2 development, please do not install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta until a future Silverlight Tools update is made available.

Download Updated Blend 2.5 Preview
If you downloaded and installed a version of Blend 2.5 Preview prior to May 9th, please uninstall your existing version of Blend 2.5 Preview and install the updated version of from the following link:

Download Refresh of Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview

Once you have the latest version of Blend 2.5 Preview installed, you can verify that you are running the latest version if your build number is 2.1.1113.0 by going to Help | About:

If you are running an earlier version of Expression Blend such as V1 or V2, please do not install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta. Instead, please wait for the final release of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 that will be compatible with all versions of Expression Blend.

Sending us Feedback
If you have any questions or encounter other issues while running Expression Blend 2.5 on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta, please let us know by posting on our forums.

Thanks,
Pete

Update (13 May 2008)
There’s been some confusion around the date of this blog post- the date that it’s picking up is when we originally discovered that we’d have to do an update to Blend coinciding with the 3.5 SP1 Beta and prepared the original draft of the blog post that we’d use to communicate the issue.

The publish date was completely accidental- just a byproduct of trying to coordinate releases. Sorry about the confusion, we really weren’t trying to be sneaky at all!