I'm a .Net, C# and WPF programmer. Is Expression Blend worth it? [closed]

I have it and rarely use it.

I greatly dislike all the extra markup that gets added to the XAML files, and prefer to know what I'm doing to just dragging/dropping items.

The few times I have used it have been to pull out the default styles or templates of a control, or to build something like a gradient, animation, or path, and then copy/paste the XAML into my project.

It's nice if you're into drag/drop coding, or if you're working on a large enough team to be have a separate UI and Coding team, but other than that I don't use it for solo development since I have to maintain the XAML mess it generates.

I stopped developing GUIs in VS and switched to Blend. It was very confusing at first, but I'm now glad I took the time to learn Blend. Most things that you can do in Blend can be done in Visual Studio, but Blend makes them much easier (once you learn how to do it). I constantly astound my fellow developers when I show them how to do something in Blend because a simple drag and drop can replace quite a bit of typing. The thing I really like about Blend is that the design surface is accurate while the Cider WPF designer in Visual Studio often lies to you or misleads you (and is just a piece of crap in general).

Blend can do the following things that Visual Studio cannot:

1. Create and manage visual states. (I guess you could do this all by hand in VS, but that's just insane for anything even moderately complex.)
2. Extract and modify control templates.
3. Easily work with behaviors (I can't imagine doing a FluidMoveBehavior by hand in VS).
4. Generate sample data for use at design time (reduces coupling of your software components).
5. WYSIWYG animation editor. (In VS you have to run the application to see the animations; Blend gives you live previews.)
6. Built in transition effects and easing functions.
7. SketchFlow (great for making a high fidelity mockup that you can show a client/stakeholder).
8. WYSIWYG path editor (great for doing simple vector artwork).
9. WYSIWYG gradient editor.
10. Import artwork from Photoshop and Illustrator.

These are the sorts of things that can really set your user experience apart from every other freelancer out there. And for the record I'm a developer with no design experience.

1. It's much easier to edit default styles as you have option Edit a copy which is extracting default style into the new one and you can change it
2. I find also very useful to edit additional styles like generated content as you can easly see what additional styles control has.
3. If you are doing animations it can make a difference as you can actually see during desgin time how is it behaving
4. If you have a dedicated designer in your team it is much more friendly for them as it's similar to photoshop/flash editing software
5. From my point of view if you are working in a team its enough to have only few expression blends