Microsoft Expression Launch Event
I'm presuming that almost everyone who follows this blog has at least one of the Expression design tools on their machine; Expression Blend (formeddrly known as "Sparkle" or Expression Interactive Designer) is an essential part of the arsenal for any WPF developer; Expression Design is a capable graphics tool that can output XAML in either WPF or "WPF/E" dialects; Expression Web is a very worthy web development product for creating standards-compliant markup, and lastly Expression Media combines digital asset management (image and media cataloging and workflow) with media encoding tools.
We've just announced the coming out party in the United States for the tool suite, with events in San Francisco, Chicago and New York during the latter half of January. If you're in or nearby any of these cities, you can register to attend some designer-focused sessions, meet up with a bunch of us and even attend a cool cocktail party. Full details and event registration can be found at the website.
If you're not conveniently placed for these sessions, remember that we have our inaugural WPF online chat taking place this Thursday at 12:30pm Pacific; details in the preceding post.
Comments
Anonymous
December 18, 2006
Personally, I'd be a lot more enthused if I thought that I'd eventually get to see the Expression stuff show up on MSDN Subscriber downloads. So thanks, but I'll pass (although the cocktail party sounds fun).Anonymous
December 19, 2006
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December 21, 2006
Ditto for me, it looks like I won't be using them. I learned about the Expression products through my MSDN newsletters, and I read about the products on many developer blogs, but Microsoft decided programmers (many experts in UI <b>design</b>) are not designers. Oops! http://miniburb.wordpress.com/2006/12/20/131/Anonymous
December 21, 2006
The funniest thing happened just yesterday.. An unnamed Microsoft exec contacted me and asked what he would have to do to get the MSDN subscriptions logos and links added to my site www.expressionblend.com... I asked him why he would want to do such a thing when MS has no plans to add the Blend product to MSDN subscriber downloads so why would my members want to buy it? His response was that he wasn’t aware that it Blend wouldn’t be included with the MSDN subscriber downloads and his first thoughts were that it was absolute stupidity.... I would say the MS has cut out at least half its enterprise development opportunities with this clearly ill-thought out decision, not to mention the little guys out there who just won’t buy it at the prices being quoted. I will be hosting a poll on this very subject within the next few weeks... it will be interesting to see the results won’t it.Anonymous
December 31, 2006
I guess I'll have to go out an hire a designer since using "Expression" is not in my job description. Hopefully, in 2007 MS will introduce a new subscription suite that costs significantly more money and includes everything... 20-30K should cover it right? That will be peanuts when compared to the overhead of my new design team :)Anonymous
January 08, 2007
I wouldnt be surprised to hear of any litigation against Microsoft for not including the Expression Web tools as part of the MSDN subscription. There are those of us who predominantly use our MSDN subscriptions for web development and who need to complement back-end connectivity and web control layout with robust front-end tools, especially those that support XAML and the very technologies that give Microsoft the lead over other development environments. It's quite an investment to fork out for Visual Studio with MSDN to not get the Expression toolset. It is a development tool and that's why I purchased MSDN.Anonymous
January 09, 2007
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January 10, 2007
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January 23, 2007
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February 12, 2007
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March 06, 2007
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