How to open a blend 4 project in Visual Studio 2010 without having Blend

I just discovered Expression Blend 4 and was amazed by the possibilities it supplies.

After having created an HMI prototype in blend, I tried to send it to a colleague who doesn't have Blend, bu开发者_高级运维t he couldn't build it.

I googled around and found a Blend 4 SDK, which he installed.

Unfortunately, he still cannot build the project...

Here's the error message he gets :

Error 1 Unknown build error, 'Cannot resolve dependency to assembly 'System.Windows, Version=2.0.5.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7cec85d7bea7798e' because it has not been preloaded. When using the ReflectionOnly APIs, dependent assemblies must be pre-loaded or loaded on demand through the ReflectionOnlyAssemblyResolve event.'

Do you know a way to easily open a blend 4 project from Visual Studio 2010?

Thank you for your help,

Antoine

For what it's worth, I had a similar problem compiling a Silverlight/WPF solution under VS2010 SP1 and .NET 4.0, and I believe it was occurring within XAML code generation. Google search revealed this error message to be very generic.

In my case, I infer the problem to be that Blend 4 installed on Windows 7 and Blend 4 installed on Windows XP results in two slightly different System.Windows.Interactivity.Dll files: the XP file is Assembly Version 4.0.5.0, and dated 5/20/2010, while the Windows 7 file is Assembly Version 4.0.0.0, file date 5/25/2010 (seems a bit anti-causal, no?). When I uninstalled Blend 4 from my XP box and kept only the 4.0.0.0 version, the problem went away.

As I mentioned, this seems to be a very generic error that can be triggered by a number of conditions, but take a close look at the assembly versions of the DLLs involved.

I gave to my colleague the libraries I have in

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Expression\Blend.NETFramework\v4.0\Libraries

and he overwrote the one he had installed with the Blend SDK.

And it worked :-)

I don't understand why there isn't a simple way to do it... Have i missed something?

In fact, anyone who wants to open a Blend Solution with Visual Studio (without having Blend installed) should just download and install the Blend SDK:

Silverlight:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=d197f51a-de07-4edf-9cba-1f1b4a22110d&displaylang=en

.Net/WPF:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=75e13d71-7c53-4382-9592-6c07c6a00207&displaylang=en

As for redistribution, you may also find a EULA and redistribution rules in the installed directory, such as:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Expression\Blend.NETFramework\v4.0

and

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Expression\Blend\Silverlight\v4.0

PS : thanks to Chuck Hays for this information.