Getting started with Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows phone

ABOUT EXPRESSION BLEND

         Microsoft Expression Blend is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for create graphical interfaces for web, destop and windows phone application.

          Expression Blend supports the WPF text engine with advanced OpenType typography and ClearType, vector-based 2D widgets, and 3D widgets with hardware acceleration via DirectX.

          On January 24, 2007, Microsoft released the first public Community Technology Preview of Expression Blend  as a free download on their website. The final version was released to manufaturing along with other Expression products on 30 April 2007.On June 07, 2010 Expression Blend supported for Silverlight 4 and WPF 4 while remaining compatible with Silverlight 3 and WPF 3.5 SP1 applications. In December 2012 Microsoft announced that that discontinued the standalone Expression suite tools. Expression Blend was integrated into Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio Express for Windows 8.

GETTING STARTED WITH EXPRESSION BLEND

1. Tools

- Windows 7 or 8

- Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 - download here

- Expression Blend - download here

- Windows phone 8 SDK - download here

2. Creating a new project using Visual Studio

- Lanch Visual Studio 2012 > File > New Project on the Visual Studio menu

- From among the tree C# templates that Visual Studio displays on its New Project dialog page, Select the Windows Phone App, as shown in Figure 1

Figure 1 - Select Windows Phone App frome C# templates.

- Change the Name of the new project to "Sample1" by changing the text in the Name Box and Click OK. Visual Studio will build your project, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

- Right click on Project name in the Solution Explorer panel and select Open in Blend, as shown in Figure 3

Figure 3

- Expression Blend will be opened with your new Project, as shown in Figure 4

Figure 4.

3. Creating a new project with Expression Blend

- Lanch Expression Blend
- File > New Project on the Blend menu.
- From among the left of the New Project dialog, select Windows Phone and Select the Windows Phone App template.
- Changing the name of the project to Sample2 by changing the text of the Name box, then click OK, as shown in Figure 5

Figure 5

- Expression Blend will build your project.

That's it.
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Thanks for reading.