There is another version of Blend that generates XAML for Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 applications, and is available for free in Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8. There aren't many differences between the generated XAML for WinRT and WPF, so we will adapt our parser to support it very soon.

I was curious if you would be able to provide a more concrete time frame for when this might be supported. Thanks!

Well, I don't think this is going to be fully implemented in one shot. The best approach is adding new features in each release that are demanded by our customers. I was investigating this the last week and the subset of NoesisGUI is quite similar in WPF and Windows Metro.

Is this high priority for you? Could you paste here a xaml that is giving you trouble?

We don't have anything in particular that isn't working right now, we are just trying to assess what is the best tool to use for editing the xaml graphically. Are they similar enough that we could feasibly edit in the express version and hand alter the xaml when problems arise? We want to avoid paying for a VS pro license so I was thinking if express support was going to happen before the trial period for the pro version ends then we could work with pro on the trial period for now. We're really just trying to weigh options.

Yes, they are very similar. XAML for Windows Runtime is a very close match to XAML for WPF. There are only a few differences that affect NoesisGUI.

We think the transition is very easy. At first, you may need tweaking a few things but our compromise is incorporating all those changes in our parser. You can report us a bug with the problems you find and we will try to incorporate the changes in our biweekly releases.

Hi,

I'm also evaluating GUI options and before I spend too much time on this one, I'd also be interesting in knowing when you fully support VS Express for use with your Unity product.

Also is there any reason why I could not use this in an OSX development environment that can run visual studio in Windows 8 via VMware Fusion, with Unity on OSX?

Hi!

There are no major/blocking problems with VS Express and NoesisGUI. There are minor problems that must be fixed and for now no user reported this as a critical problem (as soon as that happens we will give high priority to that task). We are releasing a new version each two weeks approximately. If there is room for this in the next version we will try to investigate it.

About using OSX for development, there is no problem. We use Unity in OSX here with NoesisGUI. And we already have users that are using virtual machines for Blend.