14 DAY TRIAL // On the heels of the public testing milestone of Silverlight, Microsoft also made available for download a new release of Expression Blend, designed to allow developers to build content for the next generation of its alternative to Adobe Flash. Devs will be able to leverage Expression Blend Preview not just to create websites and applications that will play nice with Silverlight 4 Beta, but also with the latest public build of the .NET Framework 4.0, namely the Beta 2 release. At the same time, Microsoft assured developers that the Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4 is fully compatible with the second Beta milestone of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.
“To coincide with the release of Silverlight 4 Beta and the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 a short while ago, we are making a version of Expression Blend available that allows you to work with .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 based projects,” revealed a member of the Expression Blend and Design team. “This release of Expression Blend works well alongside Expression Blend 3, so you can continue to work on your WPF 3.5 and Silverlight 3 based projects at the same time.”
Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform, announced the availability of Silverlight 4 Beta on stage at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 (PDC2009) in Los Angeles, in mid-November. At this point in time, Silverlight 4 Beta is exclusively a developer release. This means that Microsoft made available the first public Beta of Silverlight 4 only so that developers can have a go at the next generation of Silverlight and nothing more. Silverlight 4 is not accompanied with a go-live license and as such don’t expect to see content built specifically for the successor of Silverlight 3 on the Internet anytime soon.
In this regard, the company is advising devs to continue running Expression Blend 3 in parallel with Expression Blend Preview. “Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4 creates and modifies Silverlight 4 Beta and .NET 4 Beta 2 based applications. Please note that Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4 does not include support for Silverlight 3, .NET 3.5 or SketchFlow, please continue using Microsoft Expression Blend 3 to target these platforms,” Microsoft explained.
Microsoft Expression Blend Preview for .NET 4 is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Studio 3 Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Web 3 Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Design 3 Trial is available for download here.
Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 is available for download here.