New features in Expression Blend 3 Part 1

Blend 3 has got so many new features.But here I am going to tell some small easy to explain nice features.

1. Importing from Adobe Illustrator to Blend(*.ai files)
2. Importing from Adobe Photoshop to Blend (*.psd files)
3. Pinning support for Toolbox Windows like VisualStudio
4. FontManager
5. Auto-naming of interactive elements.
6. IntelliSense in XAML as well as in CS.
7. Annotation support.

Importing Adode files : These are just facilities to import vector based .ai files from the Adobe illustrator and psd files from PhotoShop.

Pinning support for ToolBox Windows : Now the toolboxes are same as of Visual studio toolboxes.If we don’t want some toolboxes we can pin them to the respective sides of the window.Pin button is placed same like in the Visual studio(at top right).

Font Manager : Font manager allows us to import fonts and add to our solution.Later we can pack these fonts with our application.

Tools->FontManager

Auto naming interactive elements : This gives name to the interactive elements like Button,Textbox etc.Note that this won’t name the Grid,StackPanel etc..

Tools->Name Interactive Elements

IntelliSense in XAML as well as in CS : It has got IntelliSense support for both XAML and C-Sharp.

Annotation support : Now we can add annotations over the design area of Expression Blend.They are very much useful in describing nature and purpose of visual elements.From my first experiments it seems ,WPF only supports this feature.

Tools->Create Annotation

There are some more new features such as Sample data which help us to show sample data in design time.That will be discussed soon…