Visual Studio provides developers with a strong IDE for developing RIAs. However, you may want your Silverlight applications to contain some complicated design elements, and in these cases, it’s not much fun to edit the XAML manually. To address this problem, Microsoft has created Expression Blend, a product built to edit XAML documents visually.

Add a note hereWhereas Visual Studio has been designed to cater to the developer, Expression Blend has been built for the designer. As you’ve seen, Silverlight does a fantastic job of separating the appearance and logic of an application, so developers and designers can work side by side. ASP.NET took a few strides to achieve this separation, but still fell short in many ways. I think you will find that Silverlight has reached a new layer in this separation, making it much more practical for designers and developers to truly work in parallel in designing applications.

Add a note hereThe first reaction most ASP.NET software developers will have when opening Expression Blend is shock. “Wow, this looks like no Microsoft development product I have ever seen!” And it is true that Expression Blend is quite different from the standard Visual Studio IDE type of product. The Microsoft developers have finally provided a product for the graphic designer audience, and they have attempted to make it very similar to the tools designers are accustomed to using. As software developers, we may need to play around a bit in Expression Blend to get the feel of it. Personally, I have found it quite cool to learn and use, and I think you will, too.

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Hope this helps,
Happy coding.