Not sure if you saw Scott Guthrie’s blog this morning, but if you can manage to work in Visual Studio for a while, it looks like they are working to integrate design functionality there for Silverlight 3.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/16/update-on-silverlight-2-and-a-glimpse-of-silverlight-3.aspx

They definitely seem to be doing this right – just not everything at once. =)

Jeff

I think part of my frustration with Silverlight also stems from the fact that I have to buy Expression Blend (which is expensive!). I really like Visual Web Developer Express, which I use for a bunch of ASP.NET and C# apps, but there doesn’t seem to be an option for using Expression Blend without shelling out $500. I use Visual Studio 2008 at my office, and I can guarantee they won’t be spending more money unless I can really prove it’s worth the cost.

I saw your blog post regarding getting into Silverlight. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help out – I know it can be frustrating to get rolling, but it’s pretty nice when you do.

Regarding the development platforms, Blend and Visual Studio should not be looked at as separate environments so much as complementary tool sets. Yes, you can make apps in both, but I couldn’t see working with only one or the other. Blend’s strength is the graphical portion of layout, storyboard creation, object development, etc., while Visual Studio is (obviously) where the work gets done.

I did use both tools in my book, but spent the majority of time in code. Still, I find Blend to be fairly intuitive and good at what it does.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.

Jeff Paries