December 31, 2010 – today is the last day of the decade.

1999 ended with lots of fear in people’s mind about what will happen when we enter the year 2000, whether all computer systems will come down because of Y2K, thankfully nothing bad happened and we survived Y2K.

2000-2010 Decade has given us so much. Online Social Networking has become a norm. Websites like Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we communicate. Different industries are using social networking for advertising their products. Hence Social Networking has been the biggest offering of the decade gone by.

For developers this decade has been exciting. The .NET Framework especially Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF) and Silverlight have opened new dimensions. Windows Phone 7 launched in 2010 has the new revolutionized technology which helps us stay ahead. Silverlight5 beta will be announced in January 2011 which should enhance the power of Silverlight.

The year 2011 seems to be the year of Tablets, where all computer companies will be announcing their tablet offering at the CES 2011. I am hoping to see an exciting Tablet option from Microsoft.

Like the decade gone by, I hope this coming decade brings a new range of exciting technologies to make our lives better.

I wish a very Happy New Year 2011 to all my readers. See you all in 2011 :)

The latest update to the Facebook App for Windows Phone 7 now supports the location based services called Places and the ability to tag friends in photos from the phone itself.

Source: Windows Phone Blog

May your Christmas sparkle with moments of love, laughter and goodwill, And may the year ahead be full of contentment and joy.

Have a Merry Christmas.

WPF has changed the way we design & develop our applications. Prior to WPF it was not that easy to change the look of the application. WPF gives the power of designing simple yet powerful applications which are user friendly. Visual Studio 2010 is a great tool for developing WPF applications, but Microsoft Expression Blend gives you the precise design control over the interface of your application.

It is also great to see how Blend has progressed to the current version. It was introduced as Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer(EID) code-named “Sparkle”. It was renamed to Expression Blend in December 2006. Since then many new features have been added to Blend to support the new .NET framework as they are made available. Along with designing for WPF, It is also a great tool for designing Silverlight and Windows phone 7 applications. Current version of Expression Blend is 4 which was released in June 2010.

Below is the screenshot of the earlier version of EID.

next screenshot shows the “Objects and Timeline” in Blend 4.

In next couple of articles I intend to share some of my experiences of working with Blend. I would share my tips and tricks to get the maximum out of Blend.