I'm curious what aspects you use the Expression Web for and what you prefer to do in Visual Studio.
I understand Expression Blend is for making GUI elements of WPF applications, with the programming done in Visual Studio, but how do Expression Web and Visual Studio fit together?
Expression Web is used for the UI design.
Visual Studio is used for programming the underlying model and hooking up to the UI.
They both understand XAML and can share the project/solution structure.
In fact, the were designed to inter-operate in this manner.
I prefers to use Visual Studio for most of my development needs. I briefly used Expression Web but I don't use visual design aids that much so I go back to Visual Studio & Firebug for pretty much all my web developments.
Expression Blend, on the other hand, is the go to tool if you want to do WPF & Silverlight frontend. It speeds up the UI designing process a lot.
Visual Studio is for coding!
Expression is for design!
You can easily use them together.
If you do a change in one of the the other will prompt you
for this change.
If not just refresh.
If you need to open a page through visual studio right click this page.aspx and 'open with' and find and chose expression blend.
When I've started learning Blend with VS 2010, I've used Expression Blend to make the GUI and and VS for coding. After a time I was only using Visual Studio 2010 for everything. My advice to you is to only use Visual Studio 2010 for complete development of your applications.
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I don't know the details, but when I tried Blend For Visual Studio it was such impression as Blend is just Visual Studio only with UWP support. If it so, the Blend should not be in my PC. It is really useless?
I also don't see Blend For Visual Studio among installed files. It was installed automatically with Visual Studio...
The idea is that a company has different developers for frontend and backend. While the backend developer implements some client server communication in Visual Studio, the frontend developer creates custom controls and animations in Blend. Both work in parallel. Some of the functionality of blend has been ported to the visual studio designer, however you can do a lot of additional UI related work in blend. It is therefore only useless if the company you are working for is developing the UI and the code that powers the UI sequentially.
In Visual C# 2010 Express, if I type using S suggestions automatically popup:
In Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web using F#, if I type 'open S' nothing happens. I have to key ctrl-j in order to trigger suggestions:
Is there any way to get the former behavior in 2012? I.e. not have to type ctrj-j for suggestions, but have them come up automatically?
The C# and F# Intellisense implementations are written by different teams and have different goals. In general the F# experience is more minimal than the C# one. For items like open they won't automatically popup an experience and you must manually invoke it. There is no way to change this behavior.
How can I get toolbox in Visual Studio Shell when I am working with F#? Currently I have installed F# with Visual Studio integrated mode. I want to design GUI forms with toolbox.
I don't think there is a GUI designer for F#, especially considering the discussion in this thread. But there are some tricky ways to make use of the GUI designer for C# as this article shows.
I had thought that Blend 4 was supposed to have included VS 2010 templates (for custom behaviors, etc). I have both tools installed, but I do not see the templates in Visual Studio. Is there something I need to do to install them?
The templates for that are included as part of the Blend SDK. The code for Behaviors, Triggers, etc. is also part of the SDK so you'll definitely need to install it if you want to use those classes. I did some poking around and it looks like those Templates are only available from Blend, not Visual Studio (weird).
Blend is a Silverlight / WPF designer. The aim is to separate the design concerns from the development concerns. If you type File->New Project you should see projecct templates for Silverlight and WPF data bound and non-data bound projects.
Im currently working on the GUI for an ASP.NET MVC application using Visual Studio 2005. The visual webpage designer (for the views) is awful.
Any input on what other people use would be most appreciated!
I'd like to advice you to create your markup by hand as everybody else does. Using designers is mostly unprofessional and leads to low quality results.
Visual Studio 2008 was a big step forward over 2005. 2005 was horrible. And Visual Studio 2010 is better yet - the quick snippets can save you a bunch of time once you get used to them.
Having installed and tested several products over the past few days, I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft Expression Studio is probably the best option when it comes to a visual design aid. Its code is clean and compliant, and although fairly basic, it allows you to create your layouts as required.