New Expression Tools and WPF/E...Wow!
Today is a great day! If you're a professional designer or developer looking to create a next-generation user experience, clean out your network cable, and make way for some really cool downloads.
To start with, this morning we announced Microsoft Expression Studio, a complete set of professional design tools for creating rich user experiences. Among the announcements:
- Expession Studio is made up of: Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design and Expression Media.
- As of today, you can download Expression Blend Beta 1 (formerly known as Expression Interactive Designer) and Expression Design December 2006 CTP (formerly known as Expression Graphic Designer). Both of these updates feature a greatly improved look-and-feel.
- Expression Web is now a shipping product. I've been using it to design some small sites, and its CSS support is fantastic.
- We've launched a new community for professional designers called the Microsoft Design Center. There's already some good stuff there, including some behind-the-scenes looks into the design of the Xbox 360, Windows Vista, and the 2007 Microsoft Office system.
If that isn't enough, we also released the first community technology preview of Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere, also known as "WPF/E." Key points:
- WPF/E is a cross-platform browser plug-in for delivering rich media, animation, and video content (yes, I clipped that from a marketing blurb, and you have my apologies...but it does describe it quite well).
- Spend an hour listening to Joe Stegman's Channel 9 interview about WPF/E.
- Download the browser plug-in for Windows or OS X. The Windows version is currently compatible with Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0, and Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 and 2.0. The OSX version is currently compatible with Safari and Firefox 1.5.0.8 on MacOSX 10.4.8.
- Download the WPF/E SDK for samples, tools, documentation, and a Visual Studio 2005 project template. Note that you can also view the samples and documentation online (without the SDK).
- There are three new WPF/E-related MSDN Forums to check out.
- I've updated my Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export Plug-In to support the CTP of WPF/E. After you install this updated plug-in, you'll see Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere XAML (*.XAML) added to the available export formats.
For other resources and authorities on Microsoft Expression Studio and WPF/E, check out Joe Stegman, Mike Harsh, Sean Alexander, and Scott Guthrie.
Whew! Anyone else want a cigarette!? :-)
Comments
Anonymous
December 04, 2006
Of course, if you are such a professional developer, you'll be upset to note that the current plan of record is to not ship Expression Web with the MSDN subscription that you have.Anonymous
December 04, 2006
Some exciting announcements and tools from Microsoft today. Michael Swanson's got all the informationAnonymous
December 04, 2006
Good stuff... Michael, will the Expression suite be part of the MSDN Universal subscription? I don't see the Web product listed there yet.Anonymous
December 04, 2006
Microsoft announced today the re-branding of Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer (EID) as Microsoft...Anonymous
December 05, 2006
Please, oh please, bundle with MSDN subscriptions. After all, these are essential Microsoft development tools...Anonymous
December 06, 2006
I have downloaded the WPF/E CTP & SDK, I played with them and have noticed that WPF/E does not fully support Unicode, as I use a TextBlock to test the display of Arabic text, WPF/E was rendering the text incorrectly as if it is rendering the text from left to right while it should render the text from right to left. This same behavior is true for Hebrew too which is also a right-to-left language.Anonymous
December 07, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
January 03, 2007
Well I don't see any download links - just coming soon ... Am I missing something?Anonymous
January 08, 2007
Does Expression Web support VSS?Anonymous
April 06, 2007
I'd like to see examples and howto on using Expression Web (which is now on MSDN) and being able to author WPF/E (XAML) code then add it in the web pages without getting out of the tool and doing a bunch of things by hand. Any lead to where I can find the "specific" guidance will be great!Anonymous
October 03, 2007
The comment has been removedAnonymous
December 11, 2007
Some exciting announcements and tools from Microsoft today. Michael Swanson's got all the informationAnonymous
December 03, 2008
Some exciting announcements and tools from Microsoft today. Michael Swanson's got all the information here . Of big interest to me is the first Community CTP of WPF/E ....