microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Expression Blend 2.5 problems with Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2

4 Comments

I hit a worrying error in Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 preview. In search of a good screenshot, I opened the new Clock sample, and got this result:

The same XAML compiles and runs fine in Visual Studio 2008 with the latest Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 tools.

Note that if Expression can’t render the XAML, none of its design tools can be used at all.

So what is going on here? Don’t Expression Blend and Visual Studio share the same parser? This kind of problem would soon torpedo any notion of designers and developers working seamlessly on the same code.

I got my screenshot by temporarily modifying the offending code.

4 thoughts on “Expression Blend 2.5 problems with Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2”

  1. Hi Tim,

    There seems to be plenty of this mismatch between Blend and VS design time parsers at the moment. It happens the other way too. For example if you use Blend to edit the control template it will use VisualStateManager – and VS Xaml editor won’t understand it. It will compile and run ok though.

    I agree we need this to be better, but I guess in Microsoft’s defense this is still a beta framework, with beta tools.

    Cheers

    Ian

  2. @Ian

    It is all beta; but the go-live license indicates that Microsoft thinks we can use this for real work so I do find this disappointing. Still, we will forgive Microsoft if everything is right for RTM.

    Tim

  3. Hi Tim-
    The XAML parser differences is something that we take seriously but this has definitely been one of our difficulty areas for tooling Silverlight. This is one of our top areas of focus and we welcome any bugs concerning content that cannot be loaded.

    Unfortunately we ran into this issue and some related missing type converter issues after it was too late to fix for Beta2, but we’re working on getting a more reliable fix for this.

    Pete Blois
    Program Manager, Expression Blend

  4. I’ve encountered some situations where a xaml page rendered in VS 2008 will not render after it has been compiled in Expression Blend2 June CTP. Are there any intermediate fixes?

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