#186 – When to Use Blend (vs. Visual Studio)

You could develop your entire application using only Visual Studio.  Actually, you could develop an application without Visual Studio, using your editor of choice to write the code and command line tools to build your application.

But ideally, you’ll want to use both Visual Studio and Blend.  There is a fair amount of overlap in what you can do in each tool, but the basic model is:

• Use Visual Studio to write and debug code
• Use Blend to create or edit layout of visual elements in your application

While you can use Visual Studio to do layout and you can use Blend to edit code, Visual Studio is better at working with code and Blend is better at working with layout.