Oddly, need to use Expression Design & also use the Windows Phone SDK Blend, they don’t play together.

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I don’t know about you, but I cannot get the Ultimate version that shows up in the Windows Phone SDK Blend to install and still have the Windows Phone 7 SDK Windows Phone templates in place using the Upgrade Button.  So I decided to create a Virtual PC 2007 on my design machine, which for you is a great way to go since you can get Windows 7 through the MSDNAA if you are a Science, Technology, Engineering or Math, plus Design, which is just about anyone reading this blog and in college.

You will need the Expression Blend Windows Phone 7 installation for my blogs, and for your own use.  As of 9/30/2011 the Expression Blend installed with the Windows Phone SDK doesn’t work with the Upgrade.  Now what if you wanted to use Expression Design or Expression Encoder (which is good stuff), my recommendation is that you use VPC for the Expression Design and Expression Encoder.  This might seem odd, but the Expression Blend Phone Templates installed with the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Release Candidate, which is sad.

So why use the VPC, well, I am quite impressed with Expression Design and it’s capabilities (although it would be nice to use a magic wand to get rid of a solid background).  If I place the installation in a VPC I can use the Design and then switch back to the system and use the emulator.

Please contact me if you are able to get the Expression Blend Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Release candidate to work after loading Ultimate.

So, you get Virtual PC 2007 for no cost to everyone from:

Bear in mind that this will be fixed in the future, but for now, using a Virtual PC as a work around is effective.  You should have a 4 gigabytes of RAM. Why? because the main O/S and the Virtual PC will need to share memory.