Published
Monday, December 04, 2006 10:49 AM
by
mtaulty
There's some very interesting new bits up at the Design web site.
Firstly, there's a bunch of updates to the Expression tools - there's so many announcements here including;
- Expression Design was formerly known as Expression Graphic Designer
- Expression Blend was formerley known as Expression Interactive Designer and is now at Beta 1 build.
- Expression Media provides digital asset management and workflow across the suite.
- Expression Web is shipping.
- Expression Studio == Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Media, Expression Design.
A word or two on Expression Blend as I've been using that for a little while. This was formerly known as Expression Interactive Designer and before that it was "Sparkle" and it's a tool for building rich user experiences for Windows. I'd have to say that Expression Blend has been for me a significant improvement over "Sparkle" and the new UI makes it a lot easier to use and also is much more performant and feels like a tool heading towards production to me rather than "Sparkle" which felt like more of a preview. Note: I don't know anything about the ship dates here, it's just a "feeling" I'm conveying.
As if this wasn't enough to be getting on with... :-)
The first preview of "WPF/E" is made available for people to experiment with today. At the time of writing the MSDN page seems to be live but the download looks not to be yet so hopefully the next time I manage to grab a network connection the SDK bits and the SDK docs will be up on the website. Update: I managed to get the bits after a few retries.
There's also some pretty cool demos up on that site - and there's also another first demo gone to this site.
You can also find out more information from Joe Stegman's blog up here. about what's going on and also how you can participate in the forums to steer the direction of "WPF/E" post February next year.
In my mind, "WPF/E" is about building rich browser-based experiences that span across browsers on Windows and also out to Safari on MacOS. "WPF/E" takes a subset of XAML and makes it available in the browser and also allows you to mix that content inline with your other browser based content and to build code against it.
Note that if you want to play with this in Visual Studio 2005 then you need to check out the release notes for the instructions to get a development template by installing the Web Application Projects download beforehand and then using the Tools menu "WPF/E" installs on your start menu to install the project template. I've not got this to work yet for me so I'll update here if I manage to make it work on my Vista installation.
From talking to people about Windows Presentation Foundation in the past, I know there's a lot of interest in "WPF/E" so I'd imagine that download site is going to get hit quite a lot over the next few days :-)