Have you recently installed VS2012?  Have you tried using the April Blend 5 Preview with it?  Problems?  I think I can offer you a link you will love?

Back in April, Microsoft released Microsoft Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5.  This was a good product, stable and didn’t cause too many hiccups.  But recently we upgraded to VS2012, and THAT version of Blend was…well…NOT integrated in to VS.  Gone was the great facility to open a xaml file in Blend right from the Solution Explorer.  (Note: the work around is to add the Blend 5 Preview to the Open With dialog, then explicitly open Blend, load your solution, and always use the Open With… and select your new added Blend 5 Preview option).

Well, today at lunch I read Microsoft released an update to the Blend 5 Preview explicitly for VS2012!!!!!!  Awesome news!!!!  I would highly suggest uninstalling the older version of the product before installing this one.

After you do that, you will be able to goto your XAML page in Solution Explorer, then just Open in Blend.  Then bingo, boinggo!  Blend will open up, load your solution and load your page!!!!!!  Beautiful!  The only thing I would suggest is adding a keyboard shortcut to View.OpenInBlend (I have CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+F5 cause of the Open on my Microsoft keyboard reminds me what to hit).

Note: The only issue D’Arcy caught today was the very laywer-esque clause on the page about the go-live license and using other released versions for production work.  Confusing cause the older, released version of Blend (officially Blend 4) won’t work with Silverlight 5 projects.  DOH!  Oversight?

Now you know what to do to remove your Blend hiccups, it’s time to grab a coffee and get coding!

 

 

Resources

Announcing Blend + SketchFlow Preview for Visual Studio 2012

Download link for Blend Preview for VS2012

Microsoft Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5