On July 10th, Microsoft announced the RTM of Silverlight™ 3 and the RC of Expression™ 3. Today, I’m very happy to be able to tell you that the final release of Expression Studio 3 is now available.

This is truly a coming-of-age for the Expression products. They’ve always been solid, but with this release they have the full range of features and functionality that many of us knew could be there but just wasn’t yet. I mean, the SketchFlow™ rapid prototyping tool alone should be enough to get you jazzed about Blend™ 3.

These tools have always been produced for use primarily by designers, but I’ve found that I’ve become very dependent on Blend to layout the interfaces for my WPF and Silverlight applications. This is a growing trend I’ve seen picking up stream over the past few years, creating an interesting hybrid role I like to call “the devsigner.” We all knew it would happen eventually, but Expression has really made this practical since all of the Expression products use the same project and source code files as Visual Studio™, creating a designer-developer collaboration that you just can’t find anywhere else.

If you haven’t tried any of the Expression products before, give them a try. You can download a 60-day trial from the Expression web site. Also, there is tons of information available on the product teams’ blogs.

For more information, here are some good sites to bookmark:

• Expression Products web site
• Silverlight team blog
• Expression Web blog
• Expression Blend and Design blog

After speaking at the St. Louis Day of .NET last month on building WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend, I had several people come up to me and, very excitedly, tell me how they wish there was more in-depth training available for not only Blend, but for XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language).

Well, your wishes have been granted.

I'm very pleased to announce that we'll be hosting a two day free training event called XamlFest at the St. Louis Microsoft offices from Thursday, January 29th to Friday January 30th. This will be a classroom style event led by fellow Softie John Pelak and, to a lesser degree, myself. We'll be going in depth on the XAML markup language and how it is used in both WPF and Silverlight 2.0 applications. We will also go deep on how to use Expression Blend to visually design application interfaces.

Here's all the information on the event:

Dates
The event will take place on Thursday, January 29, 2009 to Friday, January 30, 2008.

Attendees
This event is targeted toward software developers and designers who want to learn more about XAML, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight 2 and Expression Blend 2. We can accommodate 40 people for this session and registration will be accepted on a first come/first served basis.

Venue
Microsoft North Central District: St. Louis, Missouri
3 City Place Dr., Suite 1100
St. Louis, MO 63141
Phone: (314) 994-1800
Fax: (314) 991-8762

Registration
To register for XamlFest, send an email with your contact information to xamlfest-stlouis@live.com. Only 40 seats are available, so be sure to register early if you want to attend. Also, we ask that, if you find you can't make it for the session, please let us know so we can let someone else come in your place.

Please register early, because we anticipate the seats filling up fast. I look forward to seeing at XamlFest at the end of this month.

I am an old school Windows developer. I spent a large percentage of my career actually writing software to run on Windows desktops, some of it for internal use at large enterprise IT shops, some for sale in the consumer market. Since the release of .NET earlier this decade, my primary outlet for delivering Windows solutions have been WinForm projects in Visual Studio, and while they are very practical and capable of delivering great functionality, incorporating an intuitive and memorable user experience tends to be difficult. Certainly I can leverage GDI+ or even DirectX to build some compelling UI features, but on a typical project timeline where the ship date was a week ago and the budget has long been in the red, we tend to settle for the status quo and deliver what we can.

This is one of the reasons why I was so excited when I first got my hands on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). This was truly a game-changing technology for developing rich, interactive experiences on the desktop. One of the most powerful aspects of WPF is that fact that the UI layer is designed and implemented in eXtensible Application Markup Language, or XAML. This XML-based markup language gives you with the ability to not simply mock up the UI, but to build the UI, exactly they way you want it to look. And what's more, XAML provides the capability to use transitions, timelines and event triggers so designers and developers alike can implement UI level effects and activities without this code residing in the business layer or even in the UI code behind files.

Sounds great, right? So why hasn't WPF taken over the world yet? It's very simple: WPF is new. Really new. And big. Really big. The object model for WPF itself is intimidating, but then when developers who've worked with standard visual design tools for the past fifteen years get their first look at XAML, the standard response is, "Wow, I don't have time to learn all that."

Enter <XamlFest />
<XamlFest />is a free two day seminar being hosted around the country to help show that XAML and WPF are not overwhelming or even particularly hard. If you live in the central part of the US, you can attend <XamlFest /> in Houston, Texas. Here's the 411:

Dates
Monday & Tuesday October 6^th and 7^th

Attendees
The capacity for this event is 40 people and registration is done on a first come/first served basis.

Venue
Microsoft South Central District: Houston, TX
One Briar Lake Plaza
2000 W. Sam Houston Pkwy. S. #350
Houston, TX 77042
Phone: (832) 252-4300
Fax: (832) 252-4545

Daily Agenda

Registration
You can register at the following link:

https://training.partner.microsoft.com/plc/details.aspx?publisher=12&delivery=253035

This program was originally intended only for Microsoft partners, but is now open to everybody. If you don’t have a Microsoft partner account, please send an e-mail with the names and e-mail addresses of your attendees to info@msregistration.com. Don’t forget to mention you are attending the Houston event.

<XamlFest /> Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What if I don’t have Visual Studio?
A. No problem, every attendee leaves with Visual Studio 2008 Pro!

Q. What if I don’t have Expression Blend?
A. Again, no problem! Everyone leaves with Expression Studio 2.

Q. What if I don’t have an idea for a starter project?
A. We’d like you to leave with something personal, but if nothing comes to mind that’s OK too. It’s the main reason we’re planning a few guided sessions where you can fallow along with us. These sessions should take no more than two hours, so if something sparks your interest you’ll still have time left for assisted development.

Q. What if I don’t have a laptop?
A. You can still participate in the training in the mornings and lunch, but assisted development in the afternoon is a harder problem to solve. We have no problem with people pairing up, so you might want to check with friends or co-workers to see if there interested.

Q. Can I just come for the training and skip assisted development?
A. XamlFest is about empowering designers and developers to deliver great user experiences and we believe a key component is hands-on assisted development. If you are unable to participate in the afternoon sessions please wait until the day before the event to register. This will give others the opportunity to sign up first, and if there’s still space available you’re welcome to join us.

<XamlFest /> -- Come as you are, leave Xamlized!