Lee Brimelow, a senior guy at frog design (yes, that frog design) has a 14 minute tutorial on using both Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft Expression Blend at the same time to create WPF applications. So what? He creates the guts of a video player that looks great, plays well and has realtime reflection of the video in about 8 minutes flat.

If you wonder if WPF matters to your professional career or micro-ISV product, spend the 8 minutes and you will have the answer (hint: IMO, WPF is going to make a huge difference in what companies and customers expect in the next few years: the seating on a bandwagon is always best at the front!).

Lee’s point is that while you write your code in VS, Blend is an awesome tool for getting the UI to look cool, modern and 2.0 and it’s extremely easy to work on the same file in both apps at the same time. Blend just went Beta Jan. 15th. (180 day license.)

Looking for more visual WPF/Blend tutorials? Here’s one, and another, and still more.

Let’s hope Expression General Manager Eric Zocher goes to the MSDN subscription people and whacks them upside the head until they get that if they want programmers to buy into Blend it has to be part of the MSDN payload - or vice versa.

[tags]Expression Blend, WPF, Blend[/tags]