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 technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

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,

Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

and UWP applications. It was one of the applications in the Microsoft Expression Studio 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 o ...

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 "Direct", ...

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 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 websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such a ...

and

Visual Studio Express Microsoft Visual Studio Express is a set of integrated development environments (IDEs) that Microsoft developed and released free of charge. They are function-limited version of the non-free Visual Studio and require mandatory registration. Exp ...

for Windows 8.

Release history

References

{{GUI builders B User interface builders 2007 software

History

Release history

See also

References