Microsoft Blend for Visual Studio (formerly Microsoft Expression Blend) is a user interface design tool developed and sold by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. It is an interactive,

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

front-end for designing

XAML Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ) is a declarative XML-based language that Microsoft developed for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. XAML is used extensively ...

-based interfaces for

Windows Presentation Foundation Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source graphical subsystem (similar to WinForms) originally developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was init ...

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. Wh ...

and UWP applications. It was one of the applications in the

Microsoft Expression Studio Microsoft Expression Studio is a discontinued suite of tools for designing and building Web and Windows client applications and rich digital media content. Overview Microsoft introduced Microsoft Expression on September 16, 2005, at Microsoft' ...

suite before that suite was discontinued. Expression Blend supports the WPF text engine with advanced

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

typography and ClearType, vector-based 2D widgets, and 3D widgets with hardware acceleration via

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direc ...

History

Expression Blend was code-named ''Sparkle'', and originally the product was announced as ''Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer'', before it was renamed Expression Blend in December 2006. On January 24, 2007, Microsoft released the first public Community Technology Preview of Expression Blend as a free download on their web site. The final version was released to manufacturing along with other Expression products on 30 April 2007. The RTM news was announced at Microsoft's

MIX Mix, mixes or mixing may refer to: Persons & places * Mix (surname) ** Tom Mix (1880-1940), American film star * nickname of Mix Diskerud (born Mikkel, 1990), Norwegian-American soccer player * Mix camp, an informal settlement in Namibia * Mix ...

07 conference for web developers and designers. Expression Blend Service Pack 1 was released in November 2007. Expression Blend requires

.NET Framework 3.0 Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was ...

. Expression Blend and Expression Web are also available as part of the

MSDN Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

Premium subscription. In December 2012 Microsoft announced that they discontinued the standalone Expression suite tools. Expression Blend was integrated into

Visual Studio 2012 Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platfor ...

and Visual Studio Express for Windows 8.

Release history

References

{{GUI builders B User interface builders 2007 software

History

Release history

See also

References