Visual Studio

My wife comes from a Flash background and I've been slowly but surely convincing her to look more into the Expression Studio, first with v1 last year with Silverlight 1.0 and this year with the updated Expression Studio 2.0, which eventually will have Silverlight 2.0 support if I am reading all the documentation correctly. I'd love to have a dual MVP household much like Charlie and Sharon have.

One nice thing about Expression Studio 2 is that it supports the EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) file format, which earlier betas of Expression Studio 1 had support for, but apparently had issues with the exporter so it was removed from the final release of v1. Cassandra needs this format to upload her vector graphics/illustrations to iStock for publication.

Strangely enough, Expression Studio v1 was a great round-about way of getting a licensed copy of Visual Studio 2005 Standard, and Expression Studio v2 continues that tradition with a bundled copy of Visual Studio 2008 Standard.

With all that said, I spotted the Beta 2 release of the Silverlight Tools for VS 2008 on the Microsoft download center today.

Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008 includes:
Visual Basic and C# Project templates, Intellisense and code generators for XAML, Debugging of Silverlight applications, Web reference support, WCF Templates, Team Build and command line build support, Integration with Expression Blend, and Enhanced Setup with upgrade support.

You can download the update for Visual Studio 2008 here.