I've only shown a few of the features supported with Expression
Blend. All of these features work for both Silverlight and WPF
projects. All of them will also ship in the upcoming Expression Blend 2.5
March preview - which will be available to download (for free) shortly.
I think you'll find that Visual Studio 2008 and Expression
Studio bring a tremendous amount of productivity and power for building great
RIA solutions. Developers and designers can use them together when
working on the same projects (and avoid accidentally stepping on each other).
You can also easily have both open together on one machine and edit a single
application with them at the same time.
I'll be blogging more about Expression Blend (and a bunch of
features in it that I haven't covered yet) once it is available for
download. I'll also post the above simple chat example for download once
Silverlight 2 Beta1 ships so that you can open and run the code yourself.
Hope this helps,
Scott