Originally posted: 3/16/2010 at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/orville/archive/2010/03/16/updates-from-mix.aspx
In yesterday’s blog post I talked about my fun with using the Windows Phone Development Tools. Working at the Windows Phone booth at Mix yesterday I met a lot of people who are actively using Visual Studio and have or were soon going to download the CTP bits. It was also enjoyable to demonstrate how to use Visual Studio. A lot of people were familiar with the product so it was only the phone functionality that was new.
The keynote had a lot of amazing demos and being in the crowd you could feel the excitement and the “wow” factor. Especially for the T-shirt cannon controlled by a Windows Phone. One demo that I was asked about was Jon Harris’ Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone. He developed a Windows Phone application all in Blend. For anyone who has not used Expression Studio, it is a set of designer tools that when combined with Visual Studio is outstanding for designing and developing applications.
Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone is a part of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP and although not included in the single install today, it will be in the future (the 5th discovery of my Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP discoveries). I talked with Jon about Expression Blend and here is what I got.
Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone provides exactly the same streamlined development workflow for Windows Phone that was previously only available for Silverlight and .Net applications; including features such as Behaviors, sample data, and the visual state manager. As part of this release two new project templates are included, one for standard Window Phone applications and one for applications that follow an MVVM pattern. To ensure consistency across development tools Blend leverages the Windows Phone Emulator installed as part of Windows Phone Developer Tools.
Get the tools at:
Time to get ready for Day 2 of Mix, keynote and sessions.
Talk to you soon,
Orville | @orville_m
Orville McDonald 