I'm a .Net, C# and WPF programmer. Is Expression Blend worth it? [closed]

Question

I mean, as a normal developer, is there something that I will achieve with Expression Blend that I won't using VS? I have no idea of Expression Blend and at first sight didn't look very friendly / easy to learn.

What do you thing out there? It's worth the time learning to use it or I will do the same as I do with VS?

Thanks!

EDIT: I know what Microsoft says about the tools. What I want to know is if you, as a developer like me, tried Expression Blend and found that it was a waste of time or you thought it was a good tool and you stopped developing the WPF GUIs from VS and switched to EB.

Answer 1

I have it and rarely use it.

I greatly dislike all the extra markup that gets added to the XAML files, and prefer to know what I'm doing to just dragging/dropping items.

The few times I have used it have been to pull out the default styles or templates of a control, or to build something like a gradient, animation, or path, and then copy/paste the XAML into my project.

It's nice if you're into drag/drop coding, or if you're working on a large enough team to be have a separate UI and Coding team, but other than that I don't use it for solo development since I have to maintain the XAML mess it generates.