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Express Yo'self at Designertopia with new Expression Betas

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Two days of designer/developer fusion kick off today at the Designertopia conference in London.

Just in time for Designertopia comes good news from the Expression design tools front: Expression Design hit Beta 1, and Expression Blend hit Beta 2.  Both downloads are available from the Expression website.

Expression Blend (formerly Expression Interactive Designer) gives designers who are working on Windows Presentation Foundation applications a visual environment for doing their thing and collaborating with developers.

One of the features I'm most looking forward to in this beta (in addition to richer value editors) is the ability to instantiate resources from the resource pane (for instance, dragging and dropping a Button style onto the artboard, and creating a Button out of it, instead of creating a Button and applying a resource to it as a separate gesture).

 Expression Design, formerly Expression Graphic Designer, is a professional graphics and design tool.

I would be interested to hear about real-world experiences with Expression Design.  It is great at facilitating the XAML pipeline for building Windows Presentation Foundation apps, but I haven't used Expression Design "in anger" yet.

Expression Web, lest I leave it out, is Microsoft's new design environment for web developers, which I was very impressed with over the holidays. 

It fuses strong visual design support for industry standards like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) with an understanding of core ASP.NET 2.0 concepts.  Although I'm not a designer, I found the resources in Expression Web very useful when having to balance myself at the designer/developer interface.

The developer in me was very happy to see many features currently exclusive to Expression Web showing up in the next version of Visual Studio, code name "Orcas" , which eager developers can download to evaluate and test in a Virtual PC environment (link goes to January CTP).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2007
    While I'm currently in London, attending Designertopia, the VISUG / MSDN meeting with Scott Guthrie in