IT Bytes

With Mix07 just around the corner I thought I’d have a play with Silverlight 1.0, rather than the more .net like Silverlight alpha. I was a bit disappointed with Expression Blend. I won’t comment too much on the new interface style, I’m sure it’s an acquired taste, it was the lack of XAML intellisense that annoyed me. Ok, sure Blend shouldn’t be used by developers but given Microsoft’s stance of not providing a UI for anything other than the page load trigger I think it’s a bit much to expect the non-developer to use notepad to provide even the simplest of event handling. The change in emphasis is quite odd, I often complain that Visual Studio doesn’t work well for large scale developments but Blend seems only to work if you have a team of designers and developers. Even if you play both roles you’ll still need to use both Blend and Visual Studio, although you can launch one from the other it is hardly an integrated experience. Still tool quibbles aside the Silverlight itself worked well and I’ve not seen anything to stop me wanting to use it in preference to complex AJAX applications.