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The issue is that the Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone (April Refresh) is not compatible with Blend 4.0.20408.0, which was the public RC (release candidate).

A few days ago, the Blend team released a fix for an issue that was sometimes causing a crash when Blend was starting up. This new release (V4.0.20421.0) was not very well announced however, and many people (including me) did not install it. After all, Blend did not crash at startup of either of my machines, so I didn’t deem necessary to install yet a new RC.

However, it is now clear that the Windows Phone 7 Add-In needs this latest-and-greatest version to work. If you have Blend 4.0.20408.0, you won’t be able to work with Windows Phone 7 in Blend.

Styles are not compatible with on demand application loading. Imagine you want to share style dictionary among a set of application modules (something like PRISM module). The source of problem is xaml reader, which parse resource dictionary with shared style. To successfully parse dictionary it requires all controls dll to be loaded. But these controls dll are loaded on demand if module needs them.That is why if you for example load module A which doesn't requires any control libraries, but uses shared style dictionary u will get XamlParseException. We are currently hacking this issue by manual resource dictionary parsing. But it is just another dirty HACK!

In his last post, David Anson explained how it was possible for "hidden" event handlers to introduce memory leaks and showed an easy way to prevent such leaks. Now he is going to show how to diagnose a .NET memory leak with the help of WinDbg, SOS, and GCRoot.

What if you don't know the source of the memory leak in the first place? Knowing how something is leaking is the first step to fixing it, and the web has some great resources for learning more about tracking down managed memory leaks in WPF and Silverlight applications. I am not going to try to duplicate that information here. :) Instead, I'll refer interested readers to these excellent resources and recommend a bit of web searching if additional background is needed.