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.

I'm back - and here's me at Mix07

Hopefully this marks the return to some more regular posting from me! I've been buzzing around doing loads of things including dealing with some of life's inevitable personal issues for ages it seems. One of the many things I've been up to, was taking part in Ray Ozzie's keynote at Mix07 in Las Vegas, specifically during Scott Guthrie's section. I have to say, it's an amazing experience being part of an event like that (not to say an immense privilege) and I only wish more folk could have seen "backstage" because it looked more like Mission Control at NASA let me tell you. Anyway, I think the higher bandwidth versions have been removed now, but if you want to see me demonstrating Expression Studio designing for Silverlight, you can do so here until it disappears forever. Our segment starts at about 40 minutes in. The news at the show, as is very well documented now, is that Expression Studio has shipped. So as I said onstage, many congratulations to everyone who made that happen - the engineering staff of course, but all the myriad of staff who work so hard to actually get boxes on shelves and ensure that support staff are trained and on hand to help. Onwards now to the next versions. I'll be back very soon to comment on what we're working on...

Expression Blend - One step closer

Expression Blend takes another step towards its final availability with the newly released RC (release candidate) build. We've spiced up this version with a brand new set of samples to help you really get started building .NET 3 applications with high quality user interfaces. Please go grab it today.