Microsoft Expression Blend

Until recently the way Microsoft allowed you to design windows programs with .NET was called Windows Forms and this feature set of familiar looking tools was built into Visual Studio (which is a relatively expensive program but makes editing code much easier). Now Microsoft has released Expression Blend, the new way to create Windows Applications. Guess what, Expression Blend is a completely separate program from Visual Studio. You know what else, you can't edit your code directly from Expression Blend either now. So if you want to use the newest Microsoft technologies you have to fork out the money for both programs.
Now that I've got that out of my system I'd like to introduce you to creating Windows Applications with Expression Blend through what Microsoft calls WPF or Windows Presentation Foundation. Essentially you don't need Blend to create forms through WPF but it's a lot easier if you do. CoDe magazine online has a great article that helped me get started using WPF called WPF meets iPhone. This tutorial takes you through the steps of creating a new project from scratch making an interface similar to the iPhone. The online article has everything you need except Expression Blend and C# 2008 Express or VB Express (depending on which language you prefer, the tutorial offers code samples for each) including the C# and VB source code and all the resources needed. Following the article isn't hard and taught me enough to start creating my own forms with Expression Blend.
If you like this article and use Microsoft Technologies for your programming I would highly suggest subscribing to the magazine. You can read a lot of the content online, but as usual subscribers usually get a little more content.
Try and put your own twist on the iPhone interface and