News

Electric Rain recently announced a new product they're working on called Harmony.  This app will take .swf files and convert them to XAML.  This tool has the potential to help users with Flash assets ramp-up on Silverlight very quickly.  Electric Rain is promising a beta version "soon".

From the product site:

"Electric Rain Harmony provides designers and developers with a fast and easy way to convert existing Flash SWF files (graphics and simple animations*) into Microsoft-based XAML mark-up for immediate use in the Microsoft WFP and Silverlight (formally WPF/E) platforms."

(MIX 2007, Las Vegas) It was a busy day yesterday (Apr 30). With the exciting keyote by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie (see the video here: http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/video.aspx) and with 5 new external web sites that needed to go online (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight , www.silverlight.net , http://msdn.microsoft.com/silverlight, the Silverlight documentation on MSDN at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188743.aspx and the hosted Silverlight SDK documentation ar http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188266.aspx and 1 internal one for Microsoft's intranet.

The momentum around Silverlight is great and I could hear the buzz for every person I interacted with here in Vegas.

It took a lot of coordination and effort of many good people in our web operations, designs agencies (Both Ascentium and Avenue A Razorfish and other Microsoft groups to get this going and I was still perplexed that the second Scott mentioned our web presence in his keynote, the servers went live.

I am thankful to all the people that helped with this.

Now we can get back to the day to day process of updating the content to help the world build better web experiences with Silverlight.

That’s right, we're very pleased to announce that version 1 of our team's suite of end-to-end tools for creative designers is done! The process is now underway to manufacture and distribute the product. For more details on the suite and how you will be able to purchase it, see the Expression Web Site [1].

The Expression Studio suite consists of four products – Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Design and Expression Media.

There’s yet more exciting news today regarding Silverlight [2], Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight was announced recently at the at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007). Today, at the MIX07 [3] conference, Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie placed Silverlight in its longer-term context as part of the .NET platform and tools story. And Blend fits into the Silverlight tools story, too – today we have made available the Expression Blend 2 May Preview [4] which allows you to create Silverlight-based applications (either JavaScript or .NET).

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/expression

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

[3] http://visitmix.com/

[4] http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=blend2maypreview

We're pleased to present the second Beta version of Expression Blend. Here are some of the changes since the Beta 1:

• You can now instantiate resources from the Resources panel. For example, you can drag and drop a button style onto the artboard and create a button out of it instead of creating a button and applying it as a separate task.
• You can see inner exceptions when an exception happens on the design surface, allowing you to see more details about the cause of an exception.
• You now get font previews in the Text category of the Properties panel which makes it easier to choose your font. 
  After adding an event handler, the XAML file is now automatically saved for you.
• Configuring value editors has been improved. For example, you'll find editing BitmapEffects or adding items to an ItemsControl such as ContextMenu are now much easier to do.

Download Microsoft Expression Blend beta

An updated version of the Expression Design December CTP is now available that no longer expires at the beginning of 2007.   This should let you start testing again with hopefully a minimal interruption. The team appreciates all the great feedback we've been hearing and many of us have taken to reading the news groups daily in order to catch up on the latest issues.

You can download the updated CTP here:
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-design/free-trial.mspx


 

Our SDK team just announced that the "WPF/E" SDK was refreshed today on the "WPF/E" Dev Center and MSDN Library. 

The WPF/E SDK refresh includes:

-       Updated SDK docs

-       Updated QuickStart (which uses "WPF/E" for navigation!)

-       Visual Studio Template support for Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

See the new content at:

 “WPF/E” (codename) Software Development Kit (SDK) Community Technology Preview (Dec 2006)

 "WPF/E" on MSDN Library

 In addition, the QuickStart is now available at the following publicly-accessible Web location:

http://wpfesdk.members.winisp.net/quickstart/

Barak

Hello Readers,

 With the spirit of the holidays, some designers we work with have created some nice greeting cards using "WPF/E". The first card I want to share with you is this one by Michael Höhn from Futurecom in Switzerland:

This card is customizable by the URL and you can customize it using this simple configuration page.

Send some "WPF/E" love to your freinds today.

I will follow up with more cards soon.

Barak

Use your mouse wheel to zoom, drag to pan. The graphics are all done by folks on our Expression Design team, many thanks go out to them.

The project is especially appropriate for today's Expression suite announcement since I used Blend, Design and Web extensively to create it, as well as debugging in Visual Studio. The project took approximately 5 hours from scratch- I'm curious how this creation time compares to other technologies, but I'm also excited about the workflows we have planned to make this significantly easier. Easily half my time was spent working with the HTML- if people feel lost in XAML, I'm just as lost in HTML; but I'm excited to learn it.

And it's coming with lots of new features, a completely new UI, and... a new name (previously it was known as Expression Interactive Designer)!

You may find more details on the Expression Team Blog.

But wait, there is more! A new CTP of Expression Design is available and... the final version of Expression Web! Also, a new member of the Expression family (Expression Studio) was announced today: Expression Media!

And... don't forget to check out the new Expression website for more details!