This is an excerpt from the day 1 keynote at MIX10, of Jon Harris building a Windows Phone application in Expression Blend. Although the demo is slick, the main thing I wanted to point out here is the preview of the FXG Import, which is shown in the first minute. More then a few people noticed this feature and I wanted to provide an easy way to see it in action.
Import FXG file into Blend > Edit in Illustrator > file auto updates in Blend
Design/Development Workflow++
FXG Import Preview in Expression Blend from Adam Kinney on Vimeo.
You won’t find the Import feature included in the current Blend 4 Beta bits yet. The feature is being built out as an extra add-in similiar to the add-in for Windows Phone development. This way the feature can be released and updated outside of the major Blend releases, allowing it to stay in synch with the latest versions of FXG.
excited!
This is an awesome feature. Its exactly the workflow we want/need. i.e. When you save an external graphic asset the change *automatically* reflects in Blend.
Up until now this has only been possible with bitmaps and resource dictionaries. The problem with the latter is I do not know any tools that save (as opposed to explictly EXPORT) to a resource dictionary. Lots of tools save to XAML which parent to a UIElement (e.g. Canvas) but these are useless for many scenario. Some tools save to pure XAML with no parent UIElement (e.g. just a bunch of Paths) – perfect but there is no way to include/import pure XAML!
AFAIK even Expression Design does not let you do this! Will this this same feature will be added to Design 4?
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