Tell us what you think about Expression Blend 3
The Expression Team has been running a survey for the last few weeks looking to gather feedback as we start planning for the next version of Expression Blend. We want to make sure you’ve seen the survey and we don’t miss out on your valuable feedback!
Feedback from the community is a very important part of our planning process and this is a perfect opportunity to tell the Expression Blend product team what is going well for you with Blend and what isn’t. This is also your chance to let us know what you’d like to see in Blend in future releases and help shape the direction of the Expression tools.
For those of you in the USA there is the added incentive of a chance to win a Zune HD by entering a prize draw to win the newly released Zune HD! The winner will be able to personalize their own 32GB Zune HD at the Zune Store: http://zunestore.net.
The survey deadline is October 5th, 2009 @ 11:59pm and we look forward to receiving your completed surveys before that time. (You can read the official rules for the Zune drawing here.)
As the other commenters stated the new blend is great. One problem I have when editing xaml is that I often receive generic error messages "Invalid xaml" where VS will give me a more helpful error message.
A path drawing tool would also be nice (or if one exists, let the user know). This would be espically helpful when editing templates of existing controls (the checkbox is an excellent example).
Memory leak is horrible, for doing UI design of 5 simple xaml, memory spiked to 900,000 K at least after half an hour use. I was using alot of F5 as app resolution was important to the design. In an event it crashes it does not properly dismiss its expression development server sometimes so you may end up with tons of them in your tray.
Fix memory leak.
Regards,
GC.
I think it's absolutely awesome! Really great tool both for quick prototyping as well as creating sophisticated high-quality RIA and WPF apps. More I use it, more I love it!
Can you come up with an "Express" edition a la Visual Studio? I find myself needing Expression but can't afford the price tag.
I found a lot of the new layout changes from 2 to 3 excellent. There needs to be a lot of evolution in the sketchflow workflow though, like bidirectional links rather than connecting A to B and then B to A for navigation. Keep up the good work
There is a memory leak in the application, I've noticed when creating and testing animatations that when an animation is executed repeadedly in the designer memory strarts to creep. To where the application crashed but still showing as taking resources. I tend to do this as I get a sense of 'feel' for an animation.
I'd love to see a cleaned up set of controls down to thier core. When working/learning templating of controls there seems to be a lot of 'noise' in the control's XAML. Digging in and finding the layers you need to tweek is a little cumbersum. For example, changing the text box to be rounded corners vs. squared corners; I would assume one maybe two things would need to be changed. This is not the case at all. If memory serves correctly there were several layers of elements that needed to be effected, soem for mouse over, inactive, active, etc. Way too much work to add what I feel is a small tweek.
Not bad but I would have preferred a cleaner or more standardized interface. Ex: Maybe implement a "ribbon" throughout and default the theme to our windows theme (not black)
I like Expression Blend a lot... as a long time developer... there was definately a learning curve. But, I got started when Blend was a 1.0 beta release... and no one knew what XAML, WPF, XBAP, or Silverlight was all about.
I also like that it has stopped poluting the XAML generated and tries to keep it as clean as possible... easier to read later and troubleshoot.
Nice work.
I'd briefly looked at Blend when version 1, but only took an in depth look at it when Blend when version 2 was released with Silverlight 2. I really like that you include the visual state manager for WPF projects, and the improvements you've made to the xaml editor.
For Blend being as new as it is it feels incredibly mature. The power that it brings to WPF and Silverlight development is absolutly undeniable. This is the must have indespesable tool for XAML development.