Microsoft has announced a range of products targeting web designers. The product set would see the Redmond OS maker directly taking on design software powerhouse Adobe.

Available as both a fully integrated software suite and standalone packages, Microsoft has themed the new products ‘Expression’.

Expression Web will enable the creation of standards-compliant websites, and is currently shipping as an upgrade to FrontPage. Expression Blend, available in Q2 2007 will be a tool for designing Windows-only rich interactive “experiences”, while Expression Design will be used for designing visuals – logos and the like – for both the Web and Windows operating systems. Rounding off the company’s announcements was Expression Media, a tool for digital asset management and unifying team workflow.

All will be available separately, or as an integrated product called Expression Studio, earmarked for Q2 2007. Trial versions are currently available at the Microsoft Expression website: http://www.microsoft.com/expression

Said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp: “Our goal is to enable designers to collaborate like never before with development teams so that together they can raise the bar for user experiences and deliver compelling, rich, immersive, highly usable applications and content across the Web, the Windows desktop, mobile devices and the digital home."

Expression Web is available for an estimated retail price (ERP) of $299, or $99 for the FrontPage upgrade. Expression Blend will retail at an ERP of $499, Expression Media, $299, and Expression Studio, $599.

The company also released the “community technology preview” (CTP) of Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), a cross-platform plug-in to be used to view Windows Media and Expression-authored content.

The announcement is a major offensive for Microsoft in a market sector it now sees as crucial to its future. It has launched a series of sites designed to woo the interactive creative community. It has been testing creative applications for some time, but it now has a nearly finished product to roll out. It remains to be seen whether the company will manage to win the battle of hearts and minds that was partially responsible for the proliferation of Flash across the Web. Adobe met with less than spectacular success with its own vector-based tool, Livemotion, in the not so recent past, for example.

Find out more about Microsoft’s designs on design, at http://www.microsoft.com/design/

Download the WPF/E CTP at http://www.microsoft.com/wpfe

[viv_hsu05]

this is cool

[BVX]

awesome, I just don't know why I feel kind of insecure when I see the "Microsoft" and their logo...

[Renjamin]

Yeah I was readying about it last night.
And I asked myself "why?"

[BVX]

no, I have a good answer for that - Adobe's got a large piece of the design market cake. And of course M$ can't stand back and watch. It's actually good for designers - it will (hopefully!) be a good competition. Anyways - let's see what happens next.. won't it be cool if Apple start their own web design branch.. like iDesign, iScript, etc.

[sims11tz]

ya competition is always good!!!

[ba1306]

I've been using this software for the past few months....this is Sparkle's official name...Blend. This software is strickly for developing UI controls. It creates a layer that sits on top of an application and the user interacts with it but the XAML (Blend's Code Language) doesn't do anything more than execute. There's no functions in it or anything like that. It's not even in the same relm as most of Adobe's products. It's a part of MS's quest to make PCs more like Apple's. They're trying to make software more "pretty" and they've even asked PC makers to start beautifying the classic beige box.

[v1q]

Originally posted by BVX
[...]It's actually good for designers - it will (hopefully!) be a good competition. [...]

yea i can predict whats gonna happen.
"damn, my blend crashed on me for the 3rd time!!! owell, back to trusty ol adobe..."

[thom2002]

Originally posted by ba1306
I've been using this software for the past few months....this is Sparkle's official name...Blend. This software is strickly for developing UI controls. It creates a layer that sits on top of an application and the user interacts with it but the XAML (Blend's Code Language) doesn't do anything more than execute. There's no functions in it or anything like that. It's not even in the same relm as most of Adobe's products. It's a part of MS's quest to make PCs more like Apple's. They're trying to make software more "pretty" and they've even asked PC makers to start beautifying the classic beige box.

yup very true. I've been using the internal beta for a while now and the fact that people call this app a "flash killer" just makes me laugh. they do entirely different things. Blend is basically UI dev/design like you said...it can do animation and stuff like that but it's very different from flash.

Although, Expression Graphic Designer should be some nice competition for Illustrator and Web hopefully for Dreamweaver. Eitherway should be interesting to see how things pan out

[HonestWeb]

Originally posted by BVX
awesome, I just don't know why I feel kind of insecure when I see the "Microsoft" and their logo...

simple, their image is bad

[flashkicks]

Originally posted by v1q
yea i can predict whats gonna happen.
"damn, my blend crashed on me for the 3rd time!!! owell, back to trusty ol adobe..."

lol, precisely.


Pfff, I'll be sticking with all the Adobe products.

Adobe > Apple > All the other apps that no one know's about > Microsoft

[jota]

the interfaces looks great but when microsoft say that the web tool integrate with frontpage, it make me think it may not be the best way to compete with Adobe´s solutions

[Crash0]

Did any one else see that "windows-only interactive 'experiences'" and doesn't that bother anyone else? Trying to expand their monopoly to the web, i would say. If you're product is for the web make it compatible with more operating systems. geez. Did I understand that right? lol

[scrizz]

The New Blend application has the potential to be a very powerful tool. It has full access to C# and other .Net technologies. You can access code in C# or use the new XAML markup language. Both offer the same connections to the .Net framework.

Also WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) will be available on Windows XP, Vista, Apple OS X, and Linux. While it is true that you will need to author your applications on a windows box you will be able to build applications for multiple platforms using WPF/E

Additional Information
http://www.microsoft.com/products/ex.../features.mspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...ion_Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Fr..._Framework_3.0

[scrizz]

Check out these examples to see some of the early work done using WPF/E

http://www.microsoft.com/design/Voic...pfe&voice=wpfe

Scroll to the bottom to see the examples

* Note: Plug-in download will be required.

[xervia]

Yeah! its Adobe for life! i don't think Microsoft can compete with them right now, they've got so much momentum! with products like dreamweaver, and of course, flash.

I'm thinking of getting Expression Web or Studio in 2008. I prefer the GUI to be honest. I also preferred Adobe Golive's GUI. After watching the Lynda.com training for Expression Web - the layout/tools etc suit my taste. Dreamweaver is the leader yeah, but the GUI was never that instinctive for me. (I can hear the boo's don't worry). Not sure how well Expression Web will work with Flash though.. It can however import documents from other `popular' web design apps.