September 02, 2010

MS Expression Blend - Installation

When working with Silverlight or WPF the tool that you need to have is MS Expression Blend .The latest version of it is Expression Blend 4. This really helps in great design of UI and enhancing productivity. Blend helps in creating rich interfaces apart from VS2010 IDE. Blend is integrated to VS IDE ,in the sense you can open a VS IDE created File in Expression Blend and the XAML UI created by Blend will always supported by VS IDE. It should be a tool that every Silverlight developer need to have.

You can download 60 day trial version from the following link.

Installation Steps

Once you download the the tool from the link and run the exe file, an installation wizard prompts to accept the terms and conditions.

Step1

Blend-installtion

If you would like to join the customer experience program, you can check yes otherwise Check-No

Step3

Blend-step2

Check the components to be installed in Expression Studio Ultimate
Expression Blend, Studio Design & Encoder, and WPF Tool KIT.

Blend- finish

Click on finish to complete installation.

It can be integrated to TFS 2008 or TFS 2010 as well.

1. We need to make sure that TFS has correct permissions to handle the tasks . The permissions to create project is different from check out the files.

2. TFS can be connected using Team explorer.

3. We need to create a workspace that contains local  copies of source control files in TFS.

4. After the workspace is created files can be downloaded to the local folder from TFS.

5. Once the files get copied to local folder , now we can check-in, checkout or merge, compare files using TFS , from Blend or VS2010.

This way it acts exactly as collaboration tool for designers and developers.

 

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