You’ll need not more than a couple of minutes to download and install all the tools needed to create your first Windows Phone application using Blend.

Here is a tour in images:

Welcome in Blend 4

Discovering new projects templates in the Welcome dialog:

It must be quite familiar to you if you’re working with WPF or Silverlight

Choosing a target

Launching the app in the emulator

App.xaml file has all the resources for the Windows Phone theme

Let’s go now and play with the tools

The keynote at MIX09 is almost over and Expression Blend 3 has been announced !

Go ahead and grab this new version from the Microsoft Expression web site.

A video is also already available on Channel9, where Unni Ravindranathan takes on a tour to demonstrate the new features of Blend 3. I just finished watching the show and here are my notes:

• Blend3 supports Silverlight3 but there is more than that: lot of new functionalities to improve the user experience and the productivity
• Goal: be more creative inside the tool
• In Blend2, it was sort of complicated to select objects, particularly with nested containers. With Blend3 it’s a lot easier, we no longer have to navigate inside the objects explorer. Just click and you’re done
• New features to manipulate the gradients : we can manipulate the gradient stops directly from the artboard
• Supports for shaders : the assets panel now contains a “shader” category – drag’n'drop on the artboard and you’re done
• Supports for projections in Silverlight3, new category from the property grid to edit them
• Import from Photoshot and Illustrator functionality !
• XAML Intellisense (oh my god !)
• Team Foundation Server support
• Sample data source generation inside Blend3 (Blend is able to generate sample data such as texts and images)
• New features: behaviours that can be drag’n'dropped from the assets panel on the artboard to attach a piece of code to a visual element (could be used to start an animation for example)
• Easing functionality when working with animation: define elastic, cubic, exponential animations (I think designers are going to have some fun)
• New extensibility points to the Editor: custom adorners, custom panels, extend property grid, etc.

Here are some screenshots I just took running the preview on my machine. I think Blend3 is going a major step forward in the Expression Studio 3. Don’t wait a second to play with it !

Welcome to Blend3 !

The new assets panel

Easing functionality

XAML Intellisense !

I found a nice video on Channel9: “XAML Guidelines, Part 2”. The first episode, where Jaime Rodriguez interviews 3 people from Identity Mines is also available on Channel9 (unfortunately, the sound is rather poor on this episode…).

This time, Jaime meets up with Unni Ravindranathan from the Expression Blend team. During the shot, they open the Blend source code project inside Blend (sounds nice isn’t it :p). Unni explains the structure of the project, their conventions, how resources are used, etc.

I think Blend is an application we can learn a lot from. If you’re also interested to understand what architecture Blend uses, you can check out this post from Paul Stovell.

Here are some notes I took while watching the video:

• Blend is shipped with 2 themes: Expression Light & Expression Dark
• Blend resources are stored in (only !) 3 resources dictionaries
• Resources are categorized into Colors, Brushes and Styles
• Blend defines a set of margins and thicknesses that are used in the entire application to ensure a consistency across the different layouts
• By convention, Name and Key properties are always defined first in the XAML
• Properties might be spitted over several lines, if this is the case; properties are grouped together by types (style, size, appearance…)
• Blend 3 will add extensibility and improve XAML code generation:
  - Name will always be the first property
  - Better control over how the XAML is formatted
• Name everything versus name nothing? Blend names almost everything, it helps UI automation
• Static resources versus dynamic resources? No big performance impact, Blend mostly uses dynamic resources
• When design time doesn’t work fine in Blend
  - An exception can occur when Blend is creating the control because the running process is Blend itself and not the application we are creating
  - Add tests to check if code is running in design mode (you can use System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(DependencyObject) method)
  - Debug Blend process by attaching an instance of Visual Studio to Blend
• Blend is a big application:
  - 300 000 lines of XAML
  - 500 000 lines of C#

If you want more information about fixing error that we can have in Blend (while the application works properly at run time), you can check out this post of Jaime.