At this year’s Mix, next week in Las Vegas, there will be several sessions by members of the Blend team:

• Authoring for Silverlight 4 with Expression Blend
  Monday, March 15th, 2pm to 3 pm, Mandalay Ballroom D
  Christian Schormann and Pete Blois
  If you want an overview of what is new in the Blend world, this is the session for you… SketchFlow users, please don’t miss the following one:
• Prototyping Rich Silverlight 4 Applications with Microsoft Expression SketchFlow
  Wednesday, March 17, 12pm to 1pm, Breakers H
  Chris Bernard
  This session is going to show a lot about practical use of SketchFlow. Chris is also the co-author of a forthcoming book on SketchFlow.
• Dynamic Layout and Transitions for Microsoft Silverlight with Microsoft Expression Blend
  Wednesday, March 17, 11am to 11:30am, Lagoon B
  Kenny Young
  Kenny is an architect on the Blend team and master of all things layout. He’s going to show some very cool things that fans of dynamic layout should not miss…

Looking forward to seeing you there! Also follow Mix online at http://live.visitmix.com

Michael Klucher just posted about XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone. It has its first outing at GDC in San Francisco this week.

For more on Windows Phone 7, here are a number of people from the Windows Phone 7 Series Dev Team on Twitter:

(@ckindel) (@shawnhargreaves) (@ozymandias) (@ai) (@lokeuei) (@mklucher) and  (@cschormann)

Looking forward to seeing you at Mix next week or online here, or at http://live.visitmix.com with lots of more info…

Tonight, there is a live QA session about Windows Phone 7 Series @wp7dev, on Twitter, 6pm

Update 3/5/2010: Find the timeline from yesterday’s session at http://twitter.com/wp7dev

Yes, I know, there have been sooooo many rumors everywhere. But this evening Charlie Kindel, evangelist-in-chief for all things Windows Phone 7 Series, shared a little more about the strategy of the new platform, just in time to set the stage for Mix…

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Yahoo’s Chief Design Architect, Luke Wroblewski, put together a blog post that comments on the use of animation in Windows Phone 7 Series, including an interesting sampler of video snippets illustrating his points. 

Read the article here

This is an exciting time for designers of user experience. Our world is bursting from its seams, and I think we have an exciting journey ahead of us (see also this post):

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This morning, in a continent far away, Steve Ballmer announced Windows Phone 7 Series. I am very excited about the new phone.

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SketchFlow, the prototyping environment in Expression Blend, lets you build deep, dynamic prototypes with a lot of “real” interactivity.

Sometimes, these deep prototyping abilities make it easy to forget about another side of SketchFlow – the side that lets you explore and “mind map” ideas without having to think about UI details earlier than you need to.

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At PDC, a customer told me about a prototype he had built using several tab controls. He then asked me how one could include the content of different tabs of a tab control in the Microsoft Word documents that the SketchFlow Word Export creates – normally, only the tab set to visible at design time is shown.

It did not occur to me the moment that customer asked me, but there is actually a simple way to make multiple tabs of a screen appear in the Word output. The idea is very simple – just create a visual state for each tab you want to show, and edit the state so that the desired tab is shown. (more…)

I just updated the PDC demo project at http://electricbeach.org/files/SnowboardSketch_Demo_PDC.zip

The original post contained some references to the Expression Blend sample behaviors (which you can download at expressionblend.codeplex.com), but it seemed easier to make the project stand-alone by removing the references, as the samples were only used to show of the MouseGestureTrigger.

If you do want to play with that (which is great fun), just download the sample project on its own.

Regards,
    CS