Snowball - The Blog

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/.

Today I delivered a session on Mix Essentials in Belgium (Louvain-La-Neuve). The talk was about connecting Silverlight with services and data. Everything went great and every single demo worked as expected.

This morning however, I do was a little bit scared when I was trying out my demo's. I had one demo with the Flickr REST API and when testing it this morning, it didn't work anymore. Turned out that the most "easy" solution actually solved it: Flickr.com was down for about 10 minutes...

As promised, below you can download the slides and demo's. If you have any questions, please contact me.

Slidedeck: Working with Data and Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 2 - Gill Cleeren.pptx
Demo's: Demos.zip

I hope you enjoyed the session and if you have any comments about the session, please post them!

Update: here are my pictures of the event! If you have any, please post!

Mix, the popular Microsoft event that took place for the third year in Las Vegas, is getting a "Re-mix" in Belgium: "Mix Essentials - Pure information". Mix is the event on which Silverlight 1.0 was announced last year, and this year, the event was used to introduce Silverlight 2.

The event will have 2 tracks: one more technical, aimed at web-developers, the second one aimed at web designers and business strategists. One of, if not the biggest highlights of the event will of course be the closing keynote, given by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft.

Currently, the list of speakers is not yet complete, but can be seen here.

The event is free but registration is required. Location of the event is Louvain-La-Neuve and the event will take place on April 24th 2008.

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!