I use Expression Blend a lot when doing WPF and Silverlight projects. When I started using Expression Blend I was surprised to see that it didn’t support an add-in model. Tools like Adobe Photoshop have a plug-in model. Visual Studio has a long history of supporting the extensible model via add-ins. It seemed surprising to me that the Blend team hadn’t implemented a similar model.
Visual Studio Add-ins
It is hard to imagine working in Visual Studio without using add-ins. CodeRush, from DevExpress, is a perennial favorite of mine.
For the WPF developer there are two add-ins you really should add to your list.
Mole for Visual Studio, a fantastic debugger visualizer.
XAML Power Toys, generates LOB classes, datagrids and ListViews
The Hack
Josh Holmes has a great article telling how to hack Expression Blend to support add-ins.
Expression Blend, believe or not, has an add-in model. It’s highly unsupported but it exists. The unsupported nature of it means that you have to do a little Red Green style patching to get them to run in the first place and if they cause instability, don’t call Microsoft support. However, there are a couple of really cool ones that are out there.
Josh explains how to add three interesting add-ins to Blend. It is hard to pick my favorite from the his list so I’ll only show you one.
Colorful Expression
nice post, Thank for this reference