Bear with me on some basic questions here as I work through the tutorials.

I saw on the tools sticky that Visual Studio Express Blend should work for the most part however I ran into an issue trying the first part of the Unity Blend tutorial where you link to an existing item(Assets/NoesisGUI/Samples/ControlGallery/Samples/Button.xaml).

The errors are:
Can you point me in the right direction as to what I am doing wrong? The options for a new project under XAML are:

Blank App (XAML)
Grid App (XAML)
Split App (XAML)
Class Library (Windows Store apps)
Windows Runtime Component

I tried both Blank App and Class Library Windows Store Apps with same result.

It seems that they removed the GroupBox from Windows Store API

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 03560.aspx

I don't know the reasons but probably that control is no longer compatible with the new look & feel of Windows 8. I think the best workaround here is creating a proxy class in c# that does nothing but avoid the error Blend is giving.

The same for the StringFormat of the Bindings, it is missing. Although it can be emulated by using converters, as described here

http://marcominerva.wordpress.com/2013/ ... tore-apps/

Problem is that converters API is yet not available for C# (only native sdk). We are Working on it.

Ok but considering this is the very first simple control I am trying to use with Express it doesn't seem to bode well. If I go with a full version of Visual Studio I will not have these issues correct? If so I will probably just bite the bullet and get the full version.

Yes, sorry. Our samples were designed based on WPF. We will have to fix them. Would be nice if we had #defines or something like that.

WPF is the bigger API, although not necessarily the most efficient.

WPF >> Silverlight >> Windows Store >> Windows Phone

With the professional version of Visual Studio you can edit everything.

BTW found something interesting with Trial install of Visual Studio Pro 2013. Blend is installed via the 30 day trial but seems to have no expiration itself as it is a separate program. The license for Visual studio is 30 days only.

I guess I will see at the end of 30 days if Blend also gets disabled but it appears to be a standalone product.

Hmmm... which Blend version did you install? The standalone one (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... px?id=5915) or the newer version?

I just downloaded Visual Studio Pro 2013 from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads

When it installs it loads "Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013" v12.0.4 as a standalone application with a license that expires in 0 days(assuming this means never expires?).

Not tried VS 2013 but if that is true (never expiring license) it would be amazing news!

Please, keep us informed.

Just confirmed that my trial Visual Studio Pro 2013 expired after 30 days but the 2013 Blend which is included as part of the download did not. So for those with no VS pro license the 2013 trial for win8 will get you a nice working XAML editor with Blend 2013 and no expiration.

Thanks a lot for sharing. We are going to add this information to our sticky post.