Expression Blend 3 Preview is available!

I am sure you must have heard - Expression Blend 3 Preview is here! And I am back after a 2 year break from writing on this blog - if you were to use the product, you will realize what kept us busy :).

If I were to list the new features in Blend 3, it would take me a day to write. Instead, I am going to list just the set of features that I personally was responsible for:

a) The new databinding experience - We have radically redone the databinding experience in Blend 3. Be sure to check out the newly introduced support for sample data, which is a huge enabler in design scenarios that previously required writing code, or were just not possible. We also have brought to the table an unmatched DataGrid editing experience, and added have support for easily creating Master/Detail visualizations (Did I mention that creating the "Hello World" of RIAs - an RSS reader - is only a couple clicks away in Silverlight 3 using Blend 3?). More on all this shortly...
b) XAML Intellisense - easily the number one requested feature of Blend. Also, Blend now has C# and VisualBasic code editing.
c) TFS support - read more here
d) Silverlight and WPF Extensibility - read more here

A bunch of other small things that I will cover over the next few days (there are also a few more tricks that we are still holding up our sleeves, and unfortunately, I won't be able to share much information about them). You also can watch a quick video of me introducing Blend 3 here (it is very, very hard to do justice to most Blend 3 features in 20 minutes, let alone all of them!).

Hope you enjoy using Silverlight 3 (my personal three favorite SL 3 features - shaders, projection transforms, and support for out-of-browser apps - which are yours?) and Blend 3, and please don't hestitate to ask questions.