Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008 share the same solution/project file format, which means that you can create a new Silverlight project in VS 2008 and then open it in Expression Blend, or you can create a new Silverlight project in Expression Blend and open it in VS.  You can also have both Expression Blend and VS 2008 open and editing the same project as the same time.

Since in my previous Silverlight tutorial series I already showed how to create a new Silverlight project using VS 2008, let's use this post to show how to create a new Silverlight application using Expression Blend.  To do this, simply choose File->New Project in Expression Blend, select the "Silverlight 2 Application" icon, and click ok:

Figure 3

This will create a new (VS-compatible) solution file and Silverlight application project:

Figure 4

Blend includes a full WYSIWYG designer for Silverlight 2 applications.  When opening Silverlight pages and controls you can switch the design-surface to be in design view, a XAML source view, or a split-view that shows both the design view and XAML source view at the same time (and which supports live edits of both).  Above we are using the split-view option.