Action Pack Development & Design, light on Design

The Empower program has recently been discontinued and replaced by this new APDD package. It's great value as always though but the available software is a subset of Empower (No TFS for example).

The most ironic thing however is that the version of Expression Studio 4 it provides does not contain Blend, the one tool that can be used in conjunction with VS for "development & design". Why include design in the title if the design tools are not going to be provided?

So much for building pretty Silverlight apps.

Ya, I know. It's totally bad, they want to milk more $$$ for Blend I guess.

Although I was using Blend 3 and as a developer, wasn't too impressed with it. It was a huge mess mixing it with my C# app... so now I do Silverlight things in VS. OK, I can't do super fancy pancy stuff but for most of my apps, it does the job. I hate using two different tools.

I wish they would blend the Blend into VS... now THAT would be cool. hehhe...

oh and on top of that, it seems that you can not buy Blend separately... lolz.

The APDD package is a bit light on the development side as well at the moment.  I signed up for it on the 1st June and I'm still waiting to get access to Visual Studio.  I just get error messages when I try to activate my MSDN subscription and all I have managed to get from Microsoft so far is that they are looking into the issue, that was over a week ago.

Looking around the various forums it seems to be a common problem among subscribers who moved over from the old action pack subscription.

turrican said:

oh and on top of that, it seems that you can not buy Blend separately... lolz.

I could understand why the don't sell Blend on its own if all editions of Expression Studio included it, but why would you want Expression Studio without Blend - there are better alternatives to everything else in Expression Studio except Blend.

rhm said:

turrican said:

*snip*

I could understand why the don't sell Blend on its own if all editions of Expression Studio included it, but why would you want Expression Studio without Blend - there are better alternatives to everything else in Expression Studio except Blend.

 

This is the thing. I would've thought that they would want to get Blend into as many hands as possible too, in order to convince people they need it. As it is, at least my organisation, it is considered it a luxury we are unwilling to pay for.