This week we started a Silverlight project which will include a Windows 2010 Theme.  To achieve this theme, we initially built all of our controls in Photoshop to be imported into Expression Blend 4.  But we quickly found out that even PSD files with vector graphics with simple blending options do not import into Expression Blend 4 properly.

Although Expression Blend has come along way since the previous version, this particular issue perplexed me because I had heard so many good things about the improvements.  But it seemed pretty useless to import paths from Photoshop to Expression Blend.  Without Blending Options my buttons, combo boxes, and drop down lists looked white with rounded corners.

So, I went out to research a solution.  I found out that Photoshop Blending Options are Bitmap based and are not supported in Expression Blend at all!  At a loss, I kept searching for some hope.  I tried building the styles myself in Expression Blend, but the learning curve was too steep for me to re-learn everything I already know in Photoshop.

As I did more research I found that Expression Blend does support Graphic Styles from Illustrator since they are all Path based.  Although most of the Illustrator users I know don't use Graphic Styles, it was something I could pickup on easily porting from Blending Options.  I did lose all of the awesome Layer Styles I had in Photoshop, but I knew I could recreate them faster using Illustrator since I'm familiar with the layout and terminology.

As I researched, I found a tool called AI->XAML.  This did a pretty good job of making a XAML file from my AI file, but some of the Graphic Styles from my AI file did not look right in Expression Blend.  The Gradients were not as exact and the colors and transparency were off.

So I hoped for the best, and found that the standard Import from Adobe Illustrator in Expression Blend 4 supports all of the Graphic Styles that my heart desired.

So I built every control in Adobe Illustrator and simply imported into Expression Blend, right clicked on each object and selected Make Control.  Bam!  Style created.

Microsoft, you have picked up your game!  So glad we're a BizSpark company.