For the Win[JS] - Blend for Visual Studio 2012 now available (and Blend for WPF/SilverLight & SketchFlow Preview too)

Blendinsider - Available Now: Blend for Visual Studio 2012

Today, I have the great pleasure to announce the latest release of Blend. In this release cycle, our big focus has been Windows 8: Blend now supports UX authoring not just for store apps written in XAML, but also for those written in HTML.

We want to make it really easy for you to create great apps for Windows 8. Therefore, we are now including Blend with Visual Studio 2012, including the free Express for Windows 8 version for authoring Win 8 store apps. With one fast download and install you get VS for your coding-centric tasks and Blend for visual authoring.

Visual Studio 2012 and Blend can be downloaded from MSDN today if you’re an MSDN Subscriber. You can also download the free Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8, which includes Blend, or free trial versions of Visual Studio 2012 with Blend today.

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Completely new in Blend is visual authoring for HTML and CSS, especially for Windows 8 store apps.

Blend is a unique, innovative and exciting authoring tool with rich visual tools. It gives you great tools to create, edit and diagnose CSS, supporting some of the latest CSS standards, including CSS Grid, Gradients, Transitions, and media queries. Blend creates clean and standard-conformant markup.

It also is designed to handle app UX that makes heavy use of JavaScript to dynamically create and manipulate DOM elements. Blend constantly runs your code on the design surface, so that content generated by JavaScript can be displayed and edited accurately. Using Interactive Mode you can even interact with the app on the design surface and bring it into states that are not reachable via markup at all.

In summary, Blend for HTML makes visual authoring of HTML, CSS and WinJS productive, fast, and fun again.

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Announcing Blend + SketchFlow Preview for Visual Studio 2012

"We are making available a preview version of Blend + SketchFlow Preview for Visual Studio 2012. This release includes support for WPF version 3.5/4.0/4.5, Silverlight 4.0/5.0, SketchFlow, and Blend tools for Windows 8. This preview release will run on Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8, and Windows 8 Server.

WPF, Silverlight, and SketchFlow applications can be developed on any of the operating systems listed above. Windows Store apps authored in HTML and XAML require the Windows 8 client operating system. This preview also includes Blend SDKs for WPF 3.5/4.0/4.5 and Silverlight 4.0/5.0 platforms.

This is a preview version for evaluation only and none of the platforms contain a go-live license. You should use other released versions of Blend for production work. The table below lists the Blend Platforms and the version of Blend you should use for production applications.

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Good to see SketchFlow get some love (and that Blend hasn't dropped WPF/SilverLight support...)