MIX09 starts with a bang

I strongly encourage you to take a look at the recording of the Scott Guthrie keynote and take a look at the amazing stuff we have in the works. From SuperPreview in Expression Web 3 to Sketchflow and behaviors in Expression Blend 3, we will be delivering some amazing, game changing features later this year. And the Silverlight 3 features that lit up the Twitter feeds are available to use in the Blend 3 Preview announced. Please feel free to grab them today!

The Bob Rivers Show

Spent the early part of today watching a Seattle institution - and I mean that in the nicest possible way. I was fortunate to have been the backstage pass guest for the show - basically got to sit next to Bob in the studio and watching him and the crew put out the amazing morning show. I was struck by how easy they made it look, but seeing it in action for yourself showed what an amazing team effort it really was. A fascinating glimpse into Seattle life for sure. Thanks to everyone for making me feel at home, to Bob, Spike and Joe, Maura in the newsroom, Mike for arranging the invite and Arik for being host. Check out their all new Website at The Bob Rivers Show

New month, new version, new site, new way to buy!

So it's all change in the land of Microsoft Expression. We're delighted to announce the availability of version 2 of Expression Studio, that's five new versions of Microsoft's design tools all featuring support for Silverlight.

You can read about all the new features, checkout video snippets and of course, download trial versions from the brand new Expression Website that went live this morning, featuring a new look that matches the recently launched Community Website.

And there's a new way to buy this new version, the Expression Professional Subscription, which offers a range of benefits including operating systems, tools and a license for Parallels Desktop for Mac so designers with Apple hardware can run the tools with ease using either Windows Vista or Windows XP, both of which are included in the subscription.

Congratulations from me to the entire development team on this major release, and to my colleagues responsible for the new Website!

Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor™

An interesting new add-in for Expression Web is now available to try for free from our friends at WebAssist. Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor takes a huge slab out of the CSS learning curve to provide a collection of very useable and customizable CSS page layouts - all Web standards compliant of course! Eric also talks extensively about this on his site here and here. WebAssist are currently working to make it compliant with the newly announced Expression Web 2.

Microsoft Expression 2 is announced

In an absolutely jam packed keynote here at MIX08 in Las Vegas in the midst of a raft of announcements, Expression 2 was shown for the first time by my colleague Jon Harris. There's lots to say about it, but more importantly there's bits to try! Your first stop? Why not try the new Website first...Checkout the new PHP support in Expression Web, the new animation features in Blend and of course, the Silverlight features throughout. I was stunned at some of the demos we showed in the keynote - if you didn't get a chance to see it, you can watch it online now - Jon's section starts about an hour into the session. It's so nice to see how integrated Expression is becoming to so many scenarios that Microsoft is now involved with - in this case advertising. This is such an exciting time to be involved with the evolution of Expression.

Microsoft Expression Community Home

Hello - I've not been around for a while, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to say that we have a brand new Community Web Site for Microsoft Expression. There's already a ton of content and links to our new discussion forums too with product team staff on hand to help. With Mix08 next week in Las Vegas, this marks the start of an exciting couple of weeks. If any of you are going to be there, please come find me and say hello.

Service Pack for Expression Blend

Although we're obviously working hard on the next version as evidenced by the CTP of Blend 2, we wanted to make clear that we are still committed to our current version, so the team are pleased to release Service Pack 1 for Blend 1.0. A list of issues that are fixed can be found here.

Expression Blend 2 September Preview now live

I haven't really been blogging all the intermediate releases of the Expression products, but today I had to call out the new preview of Blend 2. This version really starts to roll out some of our new features and there are some great ones that I've been excited about. My favorite has to be the new animation capabilities, in particular the vertex animation. But there's plenty in there to keep you playing for hours. A breadcrumb trail for control elements, the split Design/XAML view.

All it all, excellent work from the dev crew! Give it a spin and let us have your feedback!

Free training for Blend and Design

There is 12 hours of free video training online at lynda.com at the moment hosted by Lee Brimelow (Blend) and Ted LoCascio (Design). The three courses are Getting Started with Expression Blend, the older but nonetheless still useful original Expression Blend Beta Preview and finally Getting Started with Expression Design. And of course, there's also the free 4 hours of training on the Expression website from Total Training. All in all, a ton of material to get started with the Expression tools - and more to come down the line very soon.

Silverlight - Webware 100 Finalist already

Very cool to see Silverlight already appearing in the nominations for award polls like these despite it not having shipped yet! Over the course of the next few months, I'll be blogging more and more about the specifics of designing for Silverlight using the Expression tools, in conjunction of course with the release of previews of various Expression products that support it. Just as a reminder at the moment, you can work with Silverlight with Expression Design, the preview of Expression Blend 2 and the preview of Expression Media Encoder. Watch out for refreshes in the months ahead.