Not a new post, but still good: Sandrino Di Mattia has a list on his blog with links to all the videos, assets and scripts for the 5-day on ramp training in one place: http://sandrinodimattia.net/blog/post/Complete-Expression-Blend-and-Silverlight-5-day-OnRamp-training-course-All-videos-all-assets-download-packages-in-one-place.aspx

The mission of the Expression team at Microsoft is to deliver great tools that enable designers and developers to create outstanding user experiences.

As I wrote in a previous post, the Expression at Microsoft team is hiring for a number of positions across the team, including product design, PM, UX, dev and test.

Here are links to the different job descriptions of some of the open PM and UX jobs. If you are interested in building great design and development tools and you have the right skills, we’d love to hear from you.

• Senior Program Manager, HTML Designer Tools
• Senior Program Manager, XAML Designer Tools
• Senior Program Manager, XAML Designer Tools
• Senior Program Manager, SketchFlow Prototyping Tools, in Minnesota
• Senior Program Manager, Visual Tools for Developers
• Senior UX Manager

We have demonstrated Expression 4 at Mix 2010. And today, Expression Studio 4, including Expression Blend, Web, Encoder and Design has officially been launched at Internet Week in New York, and will be available shortly.

There is a new SKU line-up and, very importantly, free upgrades for Expression 3 users. Please see www.microsoft.com/expression for more information.

For more on Expression Blend 4 specifically, you might also want to have a look at my previous post from Mix 2010:

Introducing Blend 4 – For Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone

Also, on this blog you can find a series of articles about one of the fun creative features in Expression Blend 4, path-based layout, which begins here:

Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part I

Before this post comes to a close, I’d like to use the opportunity to thank our very active customers for a lot of great and  encouraging feedback – without your interest and excitement, Expression would not be the same. And thanks to the amazing team that I have the honor to build Expression with

So much for now. Please stay tuned and most of all, have fun with Expression 4!

Celso Gomes, who is an extraordinary designer on my team in the Expression Blend world, has updated his great tutorial site, all in Silverlight of course. There are now some great tutorials based on the new samples that ship with Expression Blend 3. See:

http://nibblestutorials.net/

We have received a lot of questions about when SketchFlow would be available for you to play with. Thanks so much, all of you, for the enormous interest – we really appreciate it.

As of this morning (Friday, 10th), a version of Expression Blend 3 with SketchFlow is ready to download here.

I’ll use this post to talk about many new aspects of SketchFlow with you. This post is not a tutorial (I’ll do some of these later), but rather an overview of the concepts and ideas behind SketchFlow. Please feel free to let me know what you would like to learn more about, and I’ll try to blog about it in future installments.

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With great pleasure, I’d like to announce to my esteemed readers that a release candidate of Expression Blend 3 including SketchFlow is available for download here. You might also want to download and install the Silverlight 3 tools and developer runtime.

Thanks a lot for all the interest, feedback and inquiries you have sent since we have shown our new prototyping toolset at Mix in March. Please give it a try and let us know your thoughts.

For the Deep Zoom fans among you, there is also an RC for a new version of Deep Zoom Composer.

There will be more posts about Expression Blend 3 on this site starting today – please come and visit.

Regards,

    CS

Right before the weekend, another post on Behaviors…

In my last post, I discussed a few of the building blocks of the Behaviors mechanism in Blend 3: Triggers, Actions and Behaviors. I also talked a little bit about the Source for Triggers and the Target for actions. Let’s jump right into a sample.

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This post is the second in a series of posts about the Behaviors model in Blend 3. In this post, we’ll talk about some of the important concepts of Behaviors in Blend 3. The next posts in the series will bring some samples.

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Blend 3 introduces a powerful design pattern for interactivity: Behaviors. Behaviors allow designers to create production-quality interactivity without writing code. They work in WPF and Silverlight.

For those of you who are missing triggers in Silverlight: Behaviors give you the same power as triggers and actions plus more, in a modular and extensible fashion, not just for WPF but also for Silverlight!

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Today at Mix, Doug Olson and I presented an overview of what the next version of Blend will bring. Blend 3 is going to be a huge and exciting release, and it offers a wide range of powerful tools for both production and design phases of software development.

Blend 3 will make it easier and more cost-effective than ever to create great user experiences for WPF and Silverlight, allowing designers to retain control over their designs throughout the design and development process.

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