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Expression Studio’s Blend 3 With SketchFlow is an amazing tool. I recently attended a talk at the Ann Arbor Dot Net Users Group on the Benefits of UML by Martin Shoemaker. It was an excellent talk. I have known about SketchFlow for a very long time (since March 2009, but under NDA couldn’t talk about it). Microsoft had worked on gathering idea for it and spent a lot time on the concept, from customer feedback as early as 2006-2007 (maybe even before that). It has been in the works for a very long time with a huge amount of planning on the Expression team’s part.

Anyway, at AADNUG I extremely enjoyed Martin’s very excellent presentation on the benefits of UML. UML can really reduce your costs, identify design issues and problems and help to flesh out details that wouldn’t normally get caught between the software design and development process was a very key speeding up software design and development processes.. During his talk I kept thinking about SketchFlow and it was all I could do just to not scream it out. While it is not UML it gives the same benefits and more. You can literally take a wireframe graphic to completed design all in the same tool. The player lets you share your work with your clients and fellow team members, let them mark up comments and make enhancements and changes and doesn’t require you to even be inside of blend. You could share it as a file (really a WPF based application) or even on the web on a shared website using Silverlight.

Most of us today use a mixed bag of software design tools for engineering and creation.. Transitioning between these tools isn’t always been an easy process, but today with Expression Blend and Sketchflow you can help bring this all together. So let’s walk through a sample today and see how you can apply using Sketchflow to completely different technologies.