Introduction to Microsoft Expression Tools

Expression tools come in five packages – Expression Studio, Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, and Expression Media.

While Expression Studio, is a superset of all four (Web, Blend, Design, and Media) packages, individually, these products are packaged for different kind of audiences.

Expression Web is used to create modern, standards-based sites which deliver superior quality on the Web.

Expression Blend is used to create engaging, Web-connected, user experiences for Windows.

Expression Design is used build-compelling elements for both Web and desktop application user interfaces.

Expression Media is an asset management tool to visually catalog and organize all your digital assets for effortless retrieval and presentation.

Now question is why do you need these tools? The obvious reason is, Microsoft is trying to capture media and graphics market. Perhaps, it is a bad news for Adobe and Macromedia.

Let’s take a look at people and products involved in a website development today. In a typical website development, people involved are - designers, developers, and programmers. The designer’s role is to create graphics and arts. The developer’s role is build user-interfaces by combining graphics and HTML pages, and programmer’s role is to write code functionality and business logic. In a typical website, tools used are a graphics tool such as Photoshop or Fireworks, an HTML editor such as Visual Studio or FrontPage and a language compiler such as C#.

Now by introducing Expression tools, Microsoft is allowing designers to build interactive Websites by simply using a single tool and not even looking at the code under the hood. Most of the user interfaces can be written using the designer itself.

On the other side, now programmers will get involve in create interactive user-interfaces and not depend on the graphics designers ;-).

Visual Studio 2005 and Expression tools are integrated in such a way so you can open Visual Studio 2005 from Expression tools to write code and vice versa.

We will be adding more articles and resources related to Expression tools. If you would like to share your expertise on these tools, you are most welcome.

Learn more about Expression tools, download, and resources here:

http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/