Microsoft Blend is a user interface design tool developed and sold by Microsoft for creating graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. It is an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML-based interfaces for Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, and UWP applications. Some key features of Blend for Visual Studio include:
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Tools panel: You can use the Tools panel in Blend for Visual Studio to create and modify objects in your application. The Tools panel appears on the left-hand side of the XAML designer when you have a .xaml file open.
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Designers for advanced tasks: Blend for Visual Studio provides visual designers for advanced tasks such as animations and behaviors.
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XAML design experience: Blend for Visual Studio provides the same basic XAML design experience as Visual Studio.
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Output: Blend produces a visual design that is represented by a text file in XAML format. These XAML files, together with other resources such as images or fonts, will be the input of NoesisGUI applications.
Blend for Visual Studio is a component of Visual Studio and can be installed by choosing either the Universal Windows Platform development or .NET desktop development workload in the Visual Studio Installer. It is mostly used for designing interfaces and is similar to Visual Studio.
