Is knowing blend required?

Question

Do you expect your WPF developers to know expression blend?

Any good resources for learning more about Blend?

[UPDATE] Does knowing blend make you more productive?

Answer 1

I found Blend a great way to ease into XAML. Many of the common things you want to do are easy in Blend, especially databinding. Databinding has no intellisense and I found doing things in Blend a great way of discovering how do write the databinding syntax.

I now find myself mostly editing raw XAML buy hand.

The areas where blend is really handy:

• Customizing templates.
• Animation
• Breaking the UI down into user controls