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From my perspective, there is no more important product release previewed at MIX09 than Expression Blend 3.

Expression Blend has always been about recognizing the existence of an unsung role in application development, the role of bonding user experience to application logic. Creating an application that fully leverages the WPF/Silverlight platform requires the cross-disciplinary skills of graphic artists, animators, interaction designers, and programmers. With Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop on one side and Visual Studio on the other, multi-role development teams on the Microsoft platform never had a tool that existed just to glue the design and technical assets together in a coordinated workflow until Expression Blend. Expression Blend has since become an indispensable tools for developers and designers alike.

But Expression Blend 2 has its limits. It's merely serviceable as a protoyping tool, horrible as a text-oriented XAML editor, and not as friendly to non-technical graphical designer as one would hope. Expression Blend 3 addresses all of these limits, and it breaks out of the pack by introducing a fully formed prototyping experience worthy of an industrial design process.

As demoed, Expression Blend 3 can import Illustrator and Photoshop files, complete with layers, and are fully modifiable within Blend (for example, you can change colors, gradients, fonts, and positioning). Once in Blend, those assets can easily be given behaviors (such as click, hover, and the like). And with SketchFlow, perhaps the most significant advance in the Microsoft toolbox, the flow of the application can be modeled as a state transition diagram, all without one iota of coding. Using SketchFlow, a series of scanned sketches or other artwork can be made interactive and flow into one another. The whole thing can then be shared to end users via a free SketchFlow viewer. Users can not only navigate through the prototype, they can annotate the prototype with text and drawings and submit versioned feedback back to the prototyper. Lastly, sketches can be upgraded with a set of WPF/Silverlight controls that have been styled with a hand-drawn look-and-feel.

At Lab49, we develop advanced custom applications for financial services institutions (such as banks, exchanges, and hedge funds). In addition to building faceless line-of-business applications such as trading and pricing systems, we also do a lot of work building advanced user interfaces and data visualizations using WPF, Silverlight, and Microsoft Surface. For us, the prototyping process is critical. We need a way to communicate innovative interactive experiences before investing too much time and effort into software development. We need a way to get feedback on the content of prototype without distracting users about its aesthetics. Along the way, we've done a lot of work trying to improve the prototyping process. We've created our own controls with a hand-drawn look-and-feel and have used Blend to help model the interaction experience for our end-users. But it's taken a lot of work on our part to do something simple like an interactive, hand-drawn looking prototype.

With Expression Blend 3 and SketchFlow, the prototyping process gets a first-rate tool. Not only are prototypes easier to create in Blend 3, but they are easier to version, edit, share, and solicit feedback with. Not only are we excited, but our clients will grow to not expect anything less.