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 and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

front-end for designing

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

-based interfaces for

Windows Presentation Foundation Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source user interface framework for Windows-based desktop applications. WPF applications are based in .NET, and are primarily developed using C# and XAML. Originally developed by Microso ...

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich internet applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later version ...

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's ...

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

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

typography and

ClearType ClearType is Microsoft's implementation of subpixel rendering technology in rendering text in a font system. ClearType attempts to improve the appearance of text on certain types of computer display screens by sacrificing color fidelity for addit ...

, 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 "Direct" ...

History

Expression Blend was

code-name A code name, codename, call sign, or cryptonym is a Code word (figure of speech), code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espiona ...

d ''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 The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

of Expression Blend as a free download on their web site. The final version was released to manufacturing along with other Expression products on April 30, 2007. The RTM news was announced at Microsoft's 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. 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 were discontinuing the standalone Expression suite tools. Expression Blend was integrated into

Visual Studio 2012 Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by 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 ...

and Visual Studio Express for Windows 8.

Release history

References

{{GUI builders B User interface builders 2007 software

History

Release history

See also

References