News
Blend SP1 Fails to Launch
Blend SP1 runs into some rough patches.
Designers and developers working together is one of the narratives in Microsoft's rich Internet application (RIA) story, but the tooling to support that vision is running into some rough patches.
Expression Blend 1.0 Service Pack (SP) 1, released on Nov. 29, lets developers open their XAML-based design projects in Visual Studio 2008. The first service pack still leaves Visual Studio Team System users out in the cold, however. This was an early complaint that has not been addressed by Microsoft.
By the first week in December a second SP1 patch was underway for users who couldn't get past installation failures with SP1. According to a blog posting by Bret Ahlstrom, release program manager for the Expression Studio suite of products at Microsoft: "This is due to an incompatibility between the SP1 patch and some versions of Blend (Japanese, Korean and German for starters)."
Blend 1.0 is the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) design tooling. Expression Blend 2.0, in beta now, will provide the design front-end for WPF and Silverlight, according to Microsoft. The Expression Blend 2.0 December preview, posted last month, is a free trial beta of that tooling. The December preview adds support for VS 2008 and some Silverlight content, according to Microsoft. The free trial requires a Windows Live ID, .NET 3.5 and, for designers using Silverlight, the Silverlight 1.0 or the 1.1 (now 2.0) preview.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.