.NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta and Expression Blend

Recently, a beta of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 was released. There is currently an incompatibility with Expression Blend/SP1, Expression Blend 2, and Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 (whose version number is 2.1.1111.0) where Blend will not work if you have .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta installed.

We currently have a version of Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview (referred to as Blend 2.5 Preview from now on) that fixes this incompatibility, but you will only be able to create and edit WPF and Silverlight 1 projects. While Blend 2.5 Preview will also allow you to create and edit Silverlight 2 projects, they are not supported by Visual Studio at this time.  If you are doing any Silverlight 2 development, please do not install .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta until a future Silverlight Tools update is made available.

Download Updated Blend 2.5 Preview
If you downloaded and installed a version of Blend 2.5 Preview prior to May 9th, please uninstall your existing version of Blend 2.5 Preview and install the updated version of from the following link:


blendicon Download Refresh of Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview

Once you have the latest version of Blend 2.5 Preview installed, you can verify that you are running the latest version if your build number is 2.1.1113.0 by going to Help | About:

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If you are running an earlier version of Expression Blend such as V1 or V2, please do not install the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta. Instead, please wait for the final release of .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 that will be compatible with all versions of Expression Blend.

Sending us Feedback
If you have any questions or encounter other issues while running Expression Blend 2.5 on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Beta, please let us know by posting on our forums.

Thanks,
Pete

Update (13 May 2008)
There’s been some confusion around the date of this blog post- the date that it’s picking up is when we originally discovered that we’d have to do an update to Blend coinciding with the 3.5 SP1 Beta and prepared the original draft of the blog post that we’d use to communicate the issue.

The publish date was completely accidental- just a byproduct of trying to coordinate releases. Sorry about the confusion, we really weren’t trying to be sneaky at all!