Microsoft Expression Blend is used to create the rich graphical interfaces that are the proverbial bread and butter of Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight applications.

Blend targets application designers as opposed to developers, but, as Microsoft sees it, designers and developers will increasingly be cooperating in the application development lifecycle. Blend’s hook is that the UI elements made by designers come with a code-behind XAML file, which can then be easily read by Visual Studio.

Microsoft’s Expression Blend Service Pack 1 takes a logical step and makes the tool compatible with the recently released Visual Studio 2008. Additional features of the download are covered in the Knowledge Base articles Description of Expression Blend Service Pack 1 and Issues that are fixed in Expression Blend by Expression Blend Service Pack 1.

Microsoft has released a service pack for Visual Studio 2005 Express, the free version of its flagship IDE. There are service packs for each of the five VS 2005 Express editions — Visual Basic, C#, C++, J# and Web Development.

For details about what is included in the download, Microsoft is pointing programmers to the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Release Notes Knowledge Base article.

The full story is over on SearchWinDevelopment.com. Here’s the gist of it all:

• Silverlight 1.1 has been renamed Silverlight 2.0. Anyone surprised?
• A beta version of Silverlight 2.0 will be available by the end of March 2008 — or, in corporatespeak, by the end of the Q1 timeframe.
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta will have a Go-Live license.

Read the full story: Silverlight 2.0, formerly v1.1, to reach beta by March

Lotta folks have been bringing up the Rich Text Editor, a control written in ASP.NET and JavaScript that has been posted on CodePlex, Microsoft’s code-sharing site.

Kannan Sundararajan wrote the control, but Kirti Deshpande, of Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit group, is the one who introduced it to the wide world , thanks to a blog entry called Rich Text Editor is here. The features about which he writes include Clipboard support, a context-sensitive toolbar, the ability to format text as code blocks and, crucially, emoticons.

The control was written under the MS-PL license, which is a public license. Rather than summarize the legalese, we’ll just link to the text of the MS-PL license and let you guys exercise your brains a bit.

Microsoft has released an updated version of the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008, which are now available for download.

The download includes VB and C# project templates, XAML IntelliSense and SIlverlight debugging tools. It also integrates with Expression Blend. The download, however, is not compatible with the Visual Studio 2008 Express editions.

Get the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for Visual Studio 2008 here.