On the opening day at MIX09 Microsoft released not only the first Beta of Silverlight 3, but also a preview version of Expression Blend 3. With support for Vista RTM and SP1 and Windows XP SP2 and later, Expression Blend 3 Preview is already available for download. The fact that the solution was released in concordance with the evolution of the Silverlight technology is no coincidence, as Expression Blend 3 Preview is tailored to Silverlight 3 Beta.

“Guthrie [Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft] announced the Expression Blend 3 Preview. Visual Studio and Silverlight toolkit combine for the most comprehensive end-to-end tooling development experience available. You can take projects from initial conceptual ideas to interactive prototypes, through to client delivery of the completed project,” revealed Bruce Kyle, an architect evangelist for Microsoft in the Developer & Platform Evangelism team.

Expression Blend 3 Preview permits developers to build applications for both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as well as Silverlight 3. Microsoft informed that Silverlight 2 projects opened in the Preview will offer devs the possibility to update to Silverlight 3 Beta. It is important to note, that one of the Expression Blend features demonstrated at MIX09 is not actually included in this preview, namely SketchFlow. Microsoft informed that it was hard at work to ensure that SketchFlow would make it into the next development milestone of Expression Blend 3.

“Expression Blend 3 innovations include: SketchFlow, a rapid prototyping capability that makes it easy to communicate design intent to stakeholders; design time sample data that enables the design and testing of applications without access to live data. Direct import of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files. Behaviors, extensible and reusable components that add interactivity to applications without writing code. A full code editor supporting C#, VB and XAML. And many more features that support an improved design and development experience,” Kyle added.

Expression Blend 3 Preview is available for download here.

Silverlight 3 Beta 3 is available for download here.