Are there things you can do with Expression Blend that you can't do with regular WPF?

Question

I know that Blend does make things easier. But does it have any extra libraries available to it that give it more functionality? Or that allow things that can’t be done with regular WPF through Visual Studio?

Thanks?

Answer 1

The important libraries like Interactivity are redistributable, otherwise you would have quite some problems making use of what you did with Blend. But as they are just libraries nothing stops you from using them without Blend. Blend is a tool to make things easier just like Visual Studio, you need neither to write an application.

The product of those tools is always code (and possibly binaries), so in that sense there is nothing that only Blend can do but that is beside the point.

Answer 2

In short, no: there's nothing that Blend can do that you can't do yourself. Blend is basically just producing Xaml markup, which you can always produce by hand in Notepad if you choose to (let alone Visual Studio).

However, there are a number of things that Blend as a UI is much better suited to creating/editing - foremost in my mind are animations, which have nice pretty timeline support in Blend versus hand-typing markup in the VS designer (at least in VS2010, I'm not sure about VS2012).

There are a couple of Xml namespaces that Blend will include in your markup for its own purposes (typically to make the designer behave better). If you're a hand-editor of Xaml these are an annoyance (IMO), but they're certainly available to you still if you wanted to use them.