What is it?
Microsoft Expression Studio is a suite of design and media
applications aimed at web designers who want to collaborate more
closely with
Visual Studio developers.
In the past, these people have worked in silos demarcated by
different tool sets with incompatible file formats. In practice,
developers are often likely to be designing the user interface too,
and it is these people who Microsoft expects Expression Studio to
appeal to.
The object is partly to make web application user interfaces as
rich as desktop applications, partly to extend the
.net Framework to areas it has not been reaching, and partly to
win market share from Adobe/Macromedia, whose
Photoshop,
Flash and other applications are the de facto standards.
Although Microsoft is not yet ready to displace Adobe, some
analysts believe that Expression Studio could be more important for
Microsoft than
Windows Vista.
Where did it originate?
The Expression family was first announced at
Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in 2005. The
"release to manufacturing" of Expression Studio was at Microsoft's
Mix 07 conference at the end of April.
What's it for?
Expression Studio consists of:
● Expression Web, an HTML editor and web design program which
replaces Frontpage
● Expression Blend, previously known as Interactive Designer,
which adds interactivity
● Expression Design, previously called Graphic Designer, a
raster and vector graphics editor
● Expression Media, a digital asset manager based on the iView
Media product, which Microsoft acquired in 2006, and which includes
Expression Media Encoder.
Blend and Design have native support for XAML, Microsoft's
Extensible Application Markup Language, and much of Expression
Studio has been built using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).
XAML and WPF are key elements of .net Framework 3.0.
Microsoft says it offers some of the best support for standards
such as XML, XHTML, XSLT, Javascript, and especially Cascading
Style Sheets. However, the different applications rely on the .net
Framework 2.0 or 3.0, and Active Server Pages (ASP) .net is the
only server-side technology supported. This is bad news not only
for users of
Macromedia's Coldfusion, but also for people using "classic"
ASP. Visual Studio is another requirement, but people going the
Express Studio route are unlikely to be using anything else.
Expression Web, Expression Blend and Expression Media can all be
purchased separately, but Expression Design is only available as
part of Expression Studio.
What makes it special?
Expression Studio and Visual Studio use the same file formats,
which should eliminate a lot of error-prone manual work, such as
dealing with the incompatibilities between Visual Studio and Adobe
products such as Photoshop.
What systems does it run on?
Microsoft platforms only, except for Expression Media, which
because of its history as iView Mediapro also supports Mac OSX.
What's coming up?
A version of Expression Blend 2.0 that will support the
development of animated, interactive applications for Silverlight,
Microsoft's challenger to Flash.
More about web
development skills >>
Training
See
Microsoft's Expression
site for downloads and resources, including a 60-day trial
version of Expression Web, and www.microsoft.com/design for more
general web design topics. Get-started video tuition is included
with Expression products, or it can be
bought separately.
Rates of pay
Web designers working with Visual Studio can expect to earn
between £25,000 and £35,000.
Computer Weekly/SSL
salary survey >>
Microsoft Expression
>>
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