01 March 2009

Expression Blend 2

Been messing around with Expression Blend 2 tonight as I build my latest Silverlight project. Right now I have IE7, FF3, VS 2008 and Exp Blend 2 open. The XAML that I'm working on looks the same in IE and FF but doesn't match what VS 2008 and Expression Blend are showing me. I guess Blend is nice to have if you want to do animation but it's so crippled because there's no autocomplete. I find myself using VS 2008 for XAML editing because of that. Lacking autocomplete would be fine if all the language features were there in the properties pane. But for the life of me I can't find a MaxHeight property for an Image. Seems like that's pretty important for a designer to have. And since it's preview doesn't match what the browser is showing me, it's value is even more dubious.

Oh wait there it is, there's a little grayed out arrow at the bottom of that pane. You expand that and you get the advanced properties. Here's the image. Wow that thing is hard to see.


Still, lacking autocomplete is a deal breaker for me. Also, so far I see no way to change key bindings. Build solution in my VS is F6 but in EB it's Ctrl+Shift+B (while Run is F5). Lame.