Snowball - The Blog

Since a few hours, Expression Studio 3 is available to MSDN subscribers. The entire suite contains Blend 3 + SketchFlow, Expression Web 3, Expression Design 3 and Expression Encoder 3. Below you can see the installation running on my PC.

While each product contains many new features, the most exciting one has to be SketchFlow, part of Expression Blend 3. The tool allows you as the developer or the designer to visually show your application in no time. This provides the ability to explore, iterate and prototype user interface scenarios so you can go a lot faster from ideas to something everyone can see. A lot of info can be found on: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx. SketchFlow was first showcased at Mix09 and you can see that session here.

 

Note the pencil-like style applied to the elements: it certainly is a way to help avoiding the risk of getting reactions like “Oh, the application is done already, and still you need XXX man days?”. It really shows that it only a conceptual model of your application, not the entire app.

A trial of all Expression products can be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/expression .

The birth of the final code of Windows 7 has taken place. Just minutes ago, Windows 7 has officially been Released To Manufacturing, meaning that the final build has been done. No more changes will be made, this is the one you’ll be able to buy from October 22nd in stores everywhere. The official announcement on the Windows Team blog can be read here.

MSDN and TechNet subscribers will have access to the final build as early as August 6th, so don’t start F5’ing the download site just yet, you have a few days left to warm up that download engine!

Not only Windows 7 has been RTM’ed, also Windows Server 2008 R2 arrived at the same point.

And to finish things of, Expression Studio 3 has also been released, it’s out of beta. More can be found here.

Exactly 1 year after the release at Mix 07, Microsoft releases Expression Studio 2. The suite of tools for professional designers includes Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media and Expression Encoder.
It also works seamlessly with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, solving the age-old designer and developer workflow challenge.

Here are the most important changes that made it into this release of the Expression Suite:

• Expression Web 2 adds support for PHP and Adobe Photoshop import based on customer feedback.
 
• Expression Blend 2, in addition to Silverlight support, adds vertex animation and an improved user interface with a new split design/XAML view.
 
• Expression Design 2 adds improved exporting functionality including the ability to export slices.
 
• Expression Media 2 is a robust digital asset management solution for photographers and other creative professionals. It adds support for the latest file formats including RAW, provides geotagging functionality, and is supported by Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.
 
• Expression Encoder 2 is now a core offering of the suite. It allows creative and Web professionals to optimize almost any type of video content quickly for publishing on the Web, either in streaming video, rich-media advertising or other Web 2.0 projects.
 

For more info and trials, go to http://www.microsoft.com/expression/.

Wow, what an exciting week this is! In fact, I'm having trouble waiting for all the info that will come our way tomorrow.
Why tomorrow, you might ask? Well, Mix'08 is starting in Las Vegas in just a few hours. And as expectec, a lot of great info and visions will be shared, mostly during the big opening keynote.

A little further in this post, I have collected some info I managed to find already. Some of the things we'll see being announced tomorrow will greatly expand the possibilities we as webdevelopers/designers have. In fact, the web is wide open, the oppurtunities coming are way are endless.

One of, if not THE biggest announcement tomorrow, will of course be Silverlight 2.0 beta. A great toolset will make it much easier to create next-gen UX for the web. Datagrids will be on the rendez-vous, whom are still missed in WPF however. Today, Nokia announced the availability of Silverlight on their (Symbian) smartphones, so it's a guess, but I think we'll see more on a mobile version of Silverlight tomorrow (as I said, it's a guess...)

I managed to find some info on Expression too... Expression Studio V2 is coming this April appearantly, if we can already believe the rumors. Laurent Bugnion has more info on that on his blog.

And if you're not in Vegas, do use the possibilites of the web to take a look at the future! The opening keynote will be broadcast live (750kbps, 300kbps, 100kbps) at 9:30am Pacific / 5:30pm GMT. Microsoft also made a promise that all sessions will be downloadable within 24 hours! That means, start your download engines, go get soms sleep today, as you won't be having any time to go to bed once all this info is online!

Stay tuned for more Mix info on Snowball.be!

Earlier this week, the Expression Encoder team released Expression Encoder v1.0 (aka Expression Media Encoder). It's the first Microsoft product group to ship an application targeting the Silverlight platform.

Very important: Owners of both Expression Studio as well as Expression Media can use their product keys to unlock the RTM release.  The same download will work as a 180 day trial from http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=encoder

For a complete list of things that have changed, go here.

Today, I received a package from Microsoft US: the final version of the complete Expression Studio! Earlier, Expression Blend and Expression Web were already final, now the 2 remaining products in the suite are final too: Expression Media and Expression Design.

If you should consider buying/installing the trial, you must uninstall the older versions (CTP/beta) of these 2 titles before installing the final version.

I look forward to trying out Expression Design, as it's the only Expression product I have not worked with yet. Earlier, I built www.codeflakes.net , my second blog, completely in Expression Web, which is a great web designer tool: it has nice working intellisense, and compared to FrontPage, it's a mayor step forward and a worthy competetitor to DreamWeaver.

I'll be doing an intro to Blend 2 CTP in my Visug session on Silverlight on September 20th.

As opposed to what was said earlier, Expression Suite will be included in MSDN Premium subscriptions!! That's simply great news, isn't it?! Somasegar did the announcement today on his blog, based on the feedback they received.

Based on this feedback, I am pleased to say that we will be making Expression Web available starting today to all MSDN Premium subscribers.  We will also make Expression Blend available to MSDN Premium subscribers shortly after the Expression Studio release later in Q2 2007.   Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community.

More here.