Last year the Microsoft Expression team shipped a new suite of tools for creative professionals. This first release of Expression Studio marked a significant milestone in the history of development tools at Microsoft, delivering superior designer-developer workflow and providing designers a set of interaction design, graphic design, Web design, digital asset management and video production tools to deliver better user experiences on Windows and the Web.
I am pleased to announce, just one year later, the team has done it again with today’s release of Microsoft Expression Studio 2.
I wrote about the beta release of Expression Studio 2 announced earlier this year at MIX08. Since then, the team has put the final touches on Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Media, and Expression Encoder delivering over 100 new features ranging from support for Silverlight, .NET Framework, Office 2007, and Office for Mac 2008 to PHP and Adobe Photoshop import capabilities. You can learn more about the latest Expression Studio features here.
With Expression Studio, designers can do some pretty amazing things with unprecedented levels of productivity. Also, the seamless integration between Expression Studio and Visual Studio 2008 (and Visual Studio 2005) allows unparalleled collaboration between designers and developers. Microsoft partner and customer examples can be found in the Silverlight Showcase and the Expression Gallery.
I am also very passionate about investing in future generations of designers and developers and enabling them to have friction-free access to technology. One program I am really excited about is Microsoft DreamSpark which provides millions of students around the world free access to Microsoft products like Expression to help them on their path to becoming tomorrow’s technology leaders.
Additionally, we are introducing the Expression Professional Subscription, a premium product for professional designers that complements the MSDN Subscription for developers.
You can download fully-functional, 30-day trials for each Expression product on the main Expression site. I encourage you to send us your feedback and suggestions by joining the Expression Community which is actively monitored by members of the Expression team.
Namaste!