Enabling VisualStateManager support for WPF in Expression Blend

In Silverlight Samurai Skills, I emphasized that even though I’m primarily a developer, I usually use Expression Blend to perform design-oriented tasks for WPF and Silverlight projects.

Blend’s design surface is significantly more advanced than its VS2008 equivalent, and because Blend is a very visual, designer-oriented application, it saves you time by keeping you in “nudge-nudge-nudge” rather than “tweak-compile-run” mode.

The addition of VisualStateManager to Silverlight, and now VSM’s retrofitting into WPF, significantly simplifies the process of skinning a reusable control.  Trust me. You want VSMs, not a gajillion Storyboards and Triggers kicking around. It also formalizes the developer-designer “contract.” See Karen’s four-part series for everything you need to know about VSMs.

If you are working on a WPF project, see also the Expression Blend and Design blog for information about how to incorporate WPF VisualStateMachine integration into Blend 2 SP1. This requires a little registry tweak.

Bonus link: Rudy Grobler lists this trick among 5 useful things he recently learned about Blend.