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I am the Creative Director/Designer/Front End guy for a software company. We are redoing our software for our next release in WPF instead of Windows Forms. I have been tasked with designing the GUI portion of it. Here is where I'm stuck at. While there are tons of tutorials out there on Blend, they all relate to Silverlight. all of Microsoft's "toolbox" tutorials center around either Sketchflow or Silverlight. We don't utilize Silverlight, and I only need to start learning Blend as it pertains to GUI design/implementation - esp. importing art from Photoshop/Illustrator (I already have the Illustrator XAML plug in).

Can anyone point me in the right direction for some good tutorials? Where did other GUI designers start using Blend?

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    Most things that can be done in Silverlight can be done in WPF as well (this relationship is one-directinal though), so Silverlight tutorials should help out with WPF quite well too. Commented Mar 22, 2011 at 17:08
  • I appreciate it. I was looking for more information specific to WPF GUI design, but will start with the Silverlight tutorials. Thanks H.B. Commented Mar 22, 2011 at 17:12

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If you really want to know the relationship of WPF and Expression Blend, maybe you should ask the relationship of Developer and Designer aspects of WPF. Expression Blend is simply a designer that generates XAML (although it can be used to code in the code behind .cs or .vb).

Expression Blend can open the same csproj or vbproj file, as the same as VS 2008 or VS 2010 project file.

For more information about how Expression Blend and VS 2008/2010 WPF Editor collaborate, please visit: http://windowsclient.net/wpf/white-papers/thenewiteration.aspx

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the whitepaper is very informative, thank you both @eriawan and @Gimno for the links. I have done the 5 day "onramp" from Microsoft at the link @Gimno provided. It is geared more towards Silverlight (perhaps part of MS's agenda to take on flash?) but from everyone's explanations the basics are applicable to WPF GUI design as well. thanks all!
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I think the official Expression Blend Training page offers some good video tutorials

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some good resources, although all seem to be geared towards Silverlight. I am not clearly seeing the distinction btwn the two in the materials, and to me they are two distinctly separate solutions. I only need to learn Blend as it pertains to the WPF GUI design area.
Yes, they are something different, but when it comes to the GUI part (and by that I mean create XAML Forms / UserControls), they behave quite similiar from a general workflow POV. So, Silverlight introduction tutorials should be quite useful for creating WPF controls, the devil will be in the detail. A nice (though very outdated) comparision could be found here. It is always easiest to regard Silverlight as a more limited, web-centered brother of the WPF.

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