Expression Blend 2 September Preview
The Microsoft Expression blog announced the release of September Preview of Expression Blend yesterday. This is my first hands-on look at some of the new features in this release. 
SplitView
The first thing of note is the new splitview displaying both the XAML view along with the Design view. This is really useful for making quick edits to the XAML directly and seeing it without having to switch between the two like before. You can still display the two views separately. The default, which can be change in Document settings, is the new SplitView.
Personally when editting XAML, I will still be using Visual Studio for the Intellisense and auto-formatting. Having the Splitview available, I imagine that I will stay in blend more often to use it to quickly change properties within the controls using the XAML portion of the view. I think I will keep the Design View as the default view since when I’m in Blend, I’m wiring up bindings and such.
XAML Editor Options
The XAML Editor has been one of the pain points when using Expression Blend. The fontsize was too small, especially when demo-ing blend on a projector. Tabs were always different from Visual Studio. The font was hardcoded. I’m really happy to see Microsoft have addressed this.
I changed the default font to Consolas. In addition, I made the tabs be 4 spaces to keep the XAML clean and consistent with my settings in Visual Studio.
Making Controls from Existing Objects
Similar to the ability to re-factor code by extracting chunks of code into methods. XAML elements and animations can now be extracted into a their own user control. The user control can now be re-used to reduce duplication of XAML. Also, you can right-click on a control already laid out on the design window and select Edit control to modify it.
Storyboard Picker
The new Storyboard picker is more robust. Like before, we can select the storyboard timeline. We now also have to options to delete, duplicate, and reverse timeline. Making mouse enter and mouse leave effects will be a lot quicker with the new storyboard picker.
