New tools can be hard to get to grips with. Especially when they're dealing with a new technology like Silverlight and just for good measure blurring the boundaries between designers and developers.

Luckily a new site called NibblesTutorials has launched to provide bite-sized introductions to what you can do with Expression Blend to build silverlight projects.

Celso Gomes (the designer who's developed these tutorials) has a blog explaining the philosophy and showcasing new additions... and they're simple enough for me to follow without getting totally lost!

The cool thing is that the site is entirely built in Silverlight (so don't forget to install the runtime first).

So, a few weeks ago I had to make a mad dash to Toronto to work with the great folks from Thurling Media to show them the parts of Expression Suite they were integrating into their Expression/Silverlight introduction for NAB. It was a pretty insane trip (I spent more time on each flight than I actually spent in Toronto) but we were able to do some great stuff with Expression Design, Blend and Media - and their edit looks great.

This extract from the full video shows mostly the bits I helped out with. If you were at NAB you'll have seen the full thing. Although it all looks real the screens were actually remoted from a different room on site and the mouse and keyboard was actually being driven by me.

I'm looking forward to further opportunities to work with these guys - it's great to spend time with a very talented team who so obviously enjoy their work and produce great quality HD content.