VERDICT New interface and animation features and the ability to produce simple cross-platform Silverlight browser applications – too simple.
Expression Blend lies at the heart of Microsoft’s mission to make application development richer and more efficient as this is where you design the end user interface. XAML, Microsoft’s presentational markup language, is naturally central and Blend is the one Studio application where you can directly edit your XAML complete with full coding support. To code efficiently you really need to be able to see the effect of your changes as you work and Blend 2 adds the crucial Split view that makes this possible.

Despite its direct coding capabilities, most designers will still work mainly in Blend’s visual Design window. This is where you can add graphical elements to give your interface an individual look and feel. Blend’s drawing toolset is unchanged but new features such as Ctrl-drag copying, improved handling of multiple objects and updatable brush resources all make life easier, as does the ability to directly drag and drop external media files into your project. The integration with Studio 2’s Expression Design is even tighter thanks to improved handling of XAML containing embedded bitmaps.
Once added, you can quickly bring your elements to life. Blend 2 adds new support for vertex-level animation and, as this also applies to the points that define clipping paths, you can now animate the shape of masks. You can also now manage easing behaviour for keyframes through a new graphical spline editor – a capability that is essential for creating smooth and naturalistic results. Top-level handling of animations is also improved through a new storyboard picker with shortcuts for deleting, renaming, reversing and managing repeats.
The look and feel of your interface is important but secondary to its functionality and interactivity. This is managed in Expression Blend through controls – layout containers, text boxes, forms elements and so on - that are dragged and dropped onto your design. The range on offer in Blend 2 is unchanged, but you can now group elements to create your own custom controls for re-use in the current and future projects. There’s also a significant change to the handling of text-based controls with the ability to embed fonts with various subsetting options to improve efficiency.
Once you’ve created your interface, you need to tie your XAML controls to code-behind files to ensure that your application doesn’t just look good but actually does something. During set-up, projects in Expression Blend 2 can be targeted at either C# or Visual Basic and now at either the .NET Framework 3.0 or 3.5 to provide Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) functionality (this is built in to Vista and available as a download for XP). New projects in Expression Blend are now treated as “solutions” and you can now add multiple projects to the same solution and save copies as you work. Each solution is compatible with Visual Studio and it’s here that the code-behind logic needs to be added and the solution compiled to final EXE for deployment. This deep integration with Visual Studio is undoubtedly Blend’s biggest strength but the fact that Blend 2 still hasn’t added its own coding and deployment capabilities means that it’s not a complete solution for desktop development – a major argument in favour of Expression Studio which bundles Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition to fill the gap.
However Expression Blend 2 can now act as a standalone solution for producing an entirely new type of application. When you first set up your project you can now choose to create either a WPF-based desktop application or a Silverlight-based web application. Silverlight offers a subset of WPF functionality via a cross-platform browser add-on much like the ubiquitous Flash player so enabling Blend 2 to move beyond Windows-only desktop EXEs to create universal browser-hosted Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The process of creating your Silverlight application is remarkably simple as the control-based design process is identical. Moreover, when producing a RIA you can edit your code-behind JS file directly within the Blend environment – a particularly important capability for web application development where the designer often doubles up as the programmer – and Expression Blend 2 generates all the XAML, JS and HTML files necessary for deployment.
The problem is that it’s not just the process that is simple; the power on offer is too. While for WPF work you have 87 controls at your disposal, just 8 of these – Canvas, Ellipse, Glyphs, Image, InkPresenter, MediaElement, Rectangle and TextBlock - have been converted to work under Silverlight 1.0. And while Blend 2’s internal programming support includes colour-coding, there’s no IntelliSense, debugging or even word wrap! The biggest limitation is even more fundamental: Silverlight 1.0 only supports JavaScript-based programming which, while relatively user-friendly, is hardly industrial-strength. The bottom line is that Expression Blend 2 can be used to create simple lightweight media controls for embedding on a web page, but advanced RIAs are out of the question.
Naturally Microsoft plans to tackle both presentational and programming weaknesses and indeed has already released a beta of the Silverlight 2 player which supports many more controls and a subset of .NET functionality (C# programming in the browser!). This should be truly interesting and ensure that Blend does become a force beyond the desktop. For the moment though, Expression Blend 2’s strengths remain firmly with full-blown WPF-based EXE development as a presentational partner to Visual Studio. If it’s the promise of standalone cross-platform browser-based RIA development that appeals, you’d be better saving your money and taking a look at the free Expression Blend 2.5 preview which supports Silverlight 2.

EASE OF USE 5/6
FEATURES 4/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 4/6
OVERALL 4/6