Expression Blend allows for conceptualizing, prototyping, design and development all in one tool.

True 3D is possible with Blend, but not in Silverlight. Software rendering, however, is possible.

Wireups with button presses were done with VS.

Raster images are dropped into the XAML as a single tag with a element for the source, the image itself is not embedded.

Any content type can be put into any number of zip files, and can be used directly. This can decrease download speed and limit the number of requests to the server.

Top Banana is a desktop video editing application for the web. Because of the inherent support for Windows Media, no additional encoding was needed.

The performance was great without any optimization required.

The timeframe for releasing Top Banana was initially very short, but at the present time represents a 3-man, 5 month effort. With the current knowledge, the current app would likely be possible with 2 people in about 2 weeks.

Looking back, it is likely that because of the existing knowledge, Flash could have been done more quickly, but without the prior knowledge, Silverlight would have been faster to learn and get up to speed.

Animations are possible without a first key frame. This means that wherever the animation is within states, it will begin animating from there. So for example, if you are minimizing and then maximize, it will maximize from the state you are at in the minimization animation.