Blend 3 with Sketchflow launched today.. go to http://www.seethelight.com 
Download the release candidate now!

 

Sketchflow

It’s going to totally change how everyone designs from wireframe to finished code. It is a revolution. The UML people have been asking for this one for years. It’s now here and viable.. Thanks to the amazing work of Christian Schormann and his entire Team..

I am devoting a whole video on workflow to this, which will be available in the near future which talks about design process and using Sketchflow from wireframe to final product, with discussions on Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator, PowerPoint import as well as WORD Document export in which you can define your own templates. This works great with multi-touch screens, tablet pc’s, pen based PCs and graphics tablets.

 

Redesigned Asset Library with docking!

 

The sample data system now allows you to specify custom objects (like Brushes and your business objects), that just completely opens up the Blend sample data system for developers to better enable designers. I will post a sample of this shortly. In addition to this, we also added support for TreeView and binding to recursive collections.

Project pane search - you can easily find the files in your project, much the way it works for properties.

Find in Files - this allows you to search for information across files.

Better paste functionality - we now allow you to paste images from the clipboard.

Previewing Changes to User Controls no longer require you to build!

Marquee selection of keyframes that allows you to select multiple keyframes easily in the animation window.

A lot more functionality to make Behaviors even more easy to create and use like an easier way to pick elements, re-use the element, storyboard and state pickers, etc. This is addition to newer set of Behaviors and Actions that will be available out-of-the-box.

State editing experience - we now allow you to view previews of transitions on the design surface as you switch between states.

FluidLayout is a new feature that we a adding that allows you to design animated, dynamic layout experiences.

Support for out-of-browser Silverlight applications.

A much improved,, XAML editing experience that is robust to the typing experience

A Blend SDK that allows for Blend created projects to be portable between designers and developers without actually requiring a Blend install

 

Specifying numeric characters for Gradient Stops..

 

 

Alternate Content Properties (wow this is a huge one for all controls even 3rd party ones! Like the Silverlight toolkit below)

 

 

What is this and why is it so cool? 

 

AlternateContentProperty attribute
Annotating the properties of a control with this attribute allows you to select objects that are set as values (including DepedencyObjects) to be selected in the Blend object tree, thereby exposing a ton of new functionality like the ability to set properties on those objects, edit templates if those objects were FrameworkElements, or set new objects as values of these properties.

 

Consolidation of the style and template editing menus

Blend 3 makes it possible to access all styles in the context menu. No need to go the Object menu to edit the ItemContainerStyle of a ListBox ever again!

 

Expand/Collapse Projects

Each time you close and reopen a solution that contains multiple projects, Blend can now remember the expansion states of each project in the solution. It also remembers the set of documents you had openso you can restart working where you left off immediately.

 

WPF Templating Improvements

Blend now allows you to edit copies of controls’ templates by reverse engineering the XAML from the BAMLized resources.  Any static resource references like Brushes will now get inlined.

 

Blend allows custom control vendors to specify the original XAML file that should be used at design-time for template editing in the design-time assemblies. Blend also now correctly copy the templates from the original Generic.xaml in many more cases when the original source is available.

Sample data

Check out these blog entries below..

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/17/blend-3-great-feature-1-sample-data.aspx
http://silverzine.com/tutorials/how-to-create-sample-data-in-blend-3/

Master/Detail scenarios
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/18/blend-3-great-feature-2-master-details-screens.aspx

TreeView control
http://geekswithblogs.net/tkokke/archive/2009/06/29/styling-a-treeview-in-silverlight-and-blend-3.aspx

Element to Element binding
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2009/06/19/blend-3-great-feature-3-silverlight-element-binding.aspx

 

No More Registry Tweaking!

Registering your own library (or sets of libraries) in the asset tool is very simple. All you have to do is to setup a registry key that points to a folder containing the libraries. As an example, the Silverlight SDK registers itself into the Blend asset tool using the following key/value pair on a 64-bit machine:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Expression\Blend\3.0\Toolbox\Silverlight\v3.0\Silverlight SDK Client Libraries
Value: c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Client\

For a WPF example, the following is the way the WPF ToolKit registers itself on a 32-bit machine:
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Expression\Blend\3.0\Toolbox\WPF\v3.0\WPFToolkit
Value: C:\Program Files\WPF Toolkit\v3.5.40320.1

There are a few things you can customize around the display..

 

The Icon: For supplying a custom icon, all you need to do is to add an image to the control library (preferrably its design-time library that helps keep the size of the library small) that uses the namespace qualified name of the control for its name.

 

LLet’s  say you had a custom control Don. The icon would be then called DonsNamespace.Don.png. Few things to keep in mind: Use EmbeddedResource as the build item for the Image. Blend's asset library only supports PNGs.

 

If you wanted a 24x24 and 12x12 version of icons (since we use these two standard sizes in various places of our UI), all you have to do is to name the PNGs as follows: DonsNamespace.Foo.SmallIcon.PNG, and DonsNamespace.Foo.LargeIcon.PNG.

 

DescriptionAttribute

Setting this attribute lets you change the string that is displayed as a tooltip for the asset.

Asset Library availability: If you wanted to prevent a particular asset from being visble in the Asset Library, you can now use the ToolBoxBrowsable attribute as a part of the metadata specification for that asset in the design-time library.

Location in the category hierarchy: Again done via a newly introduced attribute (ToolBoxCategoryAttribute) that you can supply via a design-time library.

 

You can now write add-ins that extend the design surface

Here’s a sample from Uni’s Blog:

 

I am already using this feature to do development work on XAMLToon Animator Lite.. This little inker add-on sample is great for using a pen with sketchflow by the way.. Click on the picture to find out more..

 

Blend 3 Behaviors

Already much talked about…  You can get a start looking at these today at:

Pete’s MIX Session – Pete Blois gave a great overview of Behaviors in this MIX 09 session.

Using Behaviors – A quick Walkthrough by Kirupa on how to use behaviors! Pay special attention to where you find the assembly Microsoft.Expression.Interactivity.dll - you'll need that for the next link.

MIX Behavior Pack – this contains the Physics Behaviors, as well as a bunch of others.