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Expression Studio 2 hits retail


By David Worthington
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May 5, 2008 —  The second generation of Microsoft’s principal challenge to Adobe’s creative tool chain for rich Internet application interface design has hit the market, but the catch is that it still only runs on Windows.

On May 1, Expression Studio 2 became generally available. It is a suite of design tools geared toward “devsigners”—designers who can develop their own code—and is Microsoft’s primary tooling for creating Silverlight applications.

The studio is comprised of Expression Blend for UI design, the Expression Design graphics editor, Expression Encoder for video, the Expression Media digital asset management tool, and Expression Web, a WYSIWYG Web site designer that replaced FrontPage when Expression was first released in December 2006.

The studio works with the latest Microsoft platforms and tooling, including .NET Framework 3.5, Silverlight 1 and Visual Studio 2008. A beta version of Expression Blend provides support for Silverlight 2.

Some of the notable changes in the studio’s second take are the inclusion of PHP support and Adobe Photoshop import in Expression Web, as well as Silverlight 1 support in Blend. Expression Media 2 works with Mac OS X and Microsoft Office for Mac 2008.

“Microsoft is looking to break the hold on the creative types that Adobe has with Expression,” RedMonk analyst Michael Coté said in an e-mail. However, Coté believes that Expression may also be a defensive play to forestall Adobe’s rise.

“Adobe has ambitions beyond just the RIA-Web market as their Open Screens Project shows—they want to be the UI layer everywhere,” Coté explained. “Microsoft needs to protect against that and while Expression has a long way to go towards replacing the Adobe tool-chain for designers, it’s been coming along nicely.”

Coté remains concerned that aside from Expression Media, the suite only runs on Windows, thereby leaving a significant number of developers out of the Silverlight tool chain. Mac users can run Expression and Visual Studio under Windows using Boot Camp, Parallels or VMware Fusion.

Silverlight application interfaces are designed using Extensible Application Markup Language  (XAML), and the text-based XAML may be written using any editor on any operating system. It’s in Microsoft’s interest to provide tools that run on platforms other than Microsoft’s own, Coté explained.

“Silverlight is going to need not only a cross-platform story when it comes to deployment—that's just the price of admission now—but also to development and design,” Coté remarked.

But instead, Microsoft is heavily promoting Windows as a development platform, and to that end, has launched a new software subscription service targeting developers. It began to offer Expression Professional Subscriptions in March. Subscribers receive the latest versions of relevant Microsoft software and have access to a community Web site.




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