It was recently announced that expression studio is being discontinued. What is the most current tool that is being used to develop UI and animations in Silverlight? The "Microsoft Expression Changes" page doesn't make it very clear:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/eng/index.html
Thanks!
Edit: Silverlight applications for running in browsers, not windows phone.
The short and correct answer is Blend for Visual Studio 2012 with Update 2.
The reason for this is: The Expression brand is being discontinued, and for the same reason, Expression Design, Encoder, Web is all being discontinued. The same goes for Expression Blend, however the product Blend is now, and in the future, being branded as Blend for Visual Studio, and is now a part of the Visual Studio 2012 suite.
Since the Expression series is being discontinued, the products is now available for free on the Expression Website.
If you have Visual Studio 2012, install Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, and you'll have full support for Silverlight and Sketchflow for Silverlight.
In Blend for Visual Studio you have the ability to import files from programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
As the link you shared shows us the blend version for 2012 is still in preview. I haven't heard anything about "expression studio is being discontinued".
Some features for design wasn't included in VS2010 . With VS2012 design feature of Visual Studio improved. But I do not think this will be end of Blend.
As you said blend is not just only UI design tool ,also an animation tool.It looks like Adobe Flash (formerly macromedia's flash). Expression product family is very powerful and I think it must be a big investment. You can open Adobe's Photoshop PSD files with Expression Design. Encoder..SketchFlow for mockup design. many things.
Beside this , I use Blend Preview 5 for SL5 and it's not so different than Blend 4.Even more It gives Blend4 errors on dialogs :)
So for marketing they won't cancel it.
Related
I just installed Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise and selected Desktop-Development for .net features.
Now when I'm starting up Visual Studio and create a new WPF project, theres no advanced objects in the toolbox like the arc Control or more Effects other than BlurEffect and DropShadowEffect. These and many others are just missing. When I look in the object browser in Visual Studio Blend, I can't find them there either.
Do I need to install something else explicitly?
Okay so I found it out: You have to manually select "Blend for Visual Studio SDK for .NET" in the Components section of the installer. This will actually install all the advanced WPF Controls, which where missing for me.
Those where always installed from VS Installer versions 2012, 2013 and 2015 automatically (its a package of 100mb).
I can just imagine that the Idea of a much more modular installer led the designers there to think "we need to make the installation faster so push out every little package that was used commonly throughout the last 5 years.".
And then they thought: "BUT hey, when it comes to the Xamarin installation, let's KEEP IN all the Google-Emulators for Android which pack a WHOPPING 17 GB!!!"
They surely thought also: "Most people wont need these, since they either have a android device on their own or they use one of our emulators, which are vtx enabled, so 10 times faster than googles emulators, and ours also only need 1 GB of disk-space. But well, we wanted to make a fast installer after all, so let it pack our customers drives full of stuff they don't need at all".
You can right-click on a category in the toolbox and click on the "Choose items" option and try to find the tools that you are missing:
visual studio 2010 toolbox standard controls missing
Blend is more design friendly than Visual Studio though so you shouldn't be suprised if you see more options in Blend. After all, Visual Studio is a programming/coding tool and Blend is a design tool.
You rarely (or never) use the toolbox to add elements to a WPF view in a "real-world scenario. In fact it is quote common to disable the designer altogether: http://blog.spinthemoose.com/2013/03/24/disable-the-xaml-designer-in-visual-studio/. If you are a serious WPF developer you should really learn XAML and MVVM :)
Have some questions regarding Visual Studio Blend tool below:
Can i use Blend to prepare windows for Windows Forms applications or it's only for wpf applications?
If yes on 1st point how to do it (how to import such forms)?
If i am working with wpf applications can i just prepare my user interface and also develop code within Blend instead of doing windows
in Blend and then switch to normal Visual studio to develop code?
No, it's a XAML deisgner, for WPF and UWP etc.
N/A
Yes. It's a code editor, and will compile and run your project, and you can switch between VS and Blend. The switching experience is further improved in Visual Studio 2015, I personally hop between the 2 regularly.
In 2008 Artur Carvalho asked for an Alternative IDE for Silverlight and was told to look at Visual Studio Express.
Is that still the valid answer in 2010 or are there other IDEs one should consider (cost/ OS it runs on / stability)?
I'm trying to get a feel for silverlight development before commiting cash. So I don't need enterprize level tools or a license to distribute ..
Would MonoDevelop and Moonlight be an option?
On Windows I haven't heard about anything besides Visual Studio Express 2010. On Mac you can use Eclipse for Silverlight.
As for me, I don't develop SL daily rather occasionally and starting with Blend 3 I can actually use Blend for most of my smaller personal projects and don't bother to install VS although I have a licence for it. Blend now has a decent support for Intellisense and most UI stuff is easier in Blend. Yes, Blend is not free.
I am wondering whether it's feasible to host the Visual Studio 2010 editor in my WPF application - I understand the new editor is written in WPF.
If so, what control should I use?
Not an answer to your exact question (though I would bet that hosting part of vs.net isn't readily supported or licensed)...
SharpDevelop makes their code editor, Avalon Edit, available as a standalone. I'm using the beta WPF version and it is quite nice. It's got configurable syntax highlighting and auto completion support.
I can confirm that this is not supported in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2008.
See http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsldesigner/pages/general-wpf-and-silverlight-designer-faq.aspx item 5.
Thanks
Mark Wilson-Thomas
Program Manager, WPF & Silverlight Designer Team, Visual Studio
Not all of the Microsoft applications is based on the available-to-all controls. I don't see any reason, why the VS2010 should be the exclusion.
I'm sure the SharpDevelop one is probably the best option, however you could also look at ScintillaNET. This is used by MyGeneration and it very configurable.
It seems that Microsoft wants Silverlight to take off, yet I cannot find an easy way to develop in it without buying Visual Studio 2008. Has anyone out there found a way to get the silverlight development environment in the express editions of Visual Studio? Any other tools?
Here is a link for ya: HOWTO: Silverlight and Visual Studio Express,
I haven't tried it myself though.
They just released Eclipse tools for Silverlight (eclipse4SL) and I remembered this thread!
Apparently express support will come with the final release
Depending on what you consider "productive", you could work with XAMLPad for a lot of the basic declarative stuff.
The Moonlight project is working on an IDE called Lunar Eclipse, that I think they're eventually going to be integrating into MonoDevelop. Wikipedia says it's in the SVN repository already, but I don't know if there's any code for that which can actually be run effectively yet. I'd think if it's out there it'd be unusably basic if it even compiles... still, something to look into!
I only use Visual Studio as a text editor for xaml and C#. I don't use the designer in Visual Studio at all. You can put together most of your UI with Blend, open your C# files individually with Express. You don't have much intelisense in Visual Studio for the xaml anyway.
As #Brian stated, you can just use Expression blend and create any WPF/Silverlight apps. Especially if you have some Flash background/more interested in the interaction design (UX) I would recommend you to buy expression blend than VS2008.
You can write C# code in notepad and Blend will take care of the compilation.