Expression Training Day 1 - Morning

We started the day with a few presentations by Jon Harris and Andrew Shorten on what the Expression offering is all about, where it has come from and where things are headed. This was good and it was refreshing to see a Microsoft presentation pressing all the right buttons in terms of user experience and engagement, whilst also maintaining a level-headed and realistic approach to "Reach vs. Rich". Bear in mind this wasn't "Microsoft-the-biggest-company-in-the-world" presenting, this was two guys, enthusiastic about the industry we're in, enthused by the products they're working with, excited by the prospect of others working with their products and who happen to work for Microsoft. I think MS are starting to get it.

We then had a run through of the Expression Suite which by memory is as follows:

Expression Web - this is absolutely, definitely, without-a-doubt, positively NOT FrontPage... well it kind of is but FrontPage has such a bad rep they've cut the chord indefinitely. The long and the short of it is that it's a HTML editor more on this later in the post.

Expression Design - Import vector and export XAML... hard to describe without more research and I'm going to wait until I have a play before defining where it sits.

Expression Blend - FLASH KILLER!!! Only joking, I've not looked into it yet, but it appears this is the element that could be closest associated to Flash. Although its focus seems to be purely on user interaction and visuals and not at all concerned with programming of business logic, no code is written in Blend. Again, will hold off thorough assessment until I have had a decent play with it.

Expression Media - Now this does look interesting and is apparently very much the focus of the announcements at NAB. To me it looks like a form of digital media management. It allows management of your media assets, manipulation and batch processing of those assets and various import/export capabilities.

Now those are some pretty vague overviews. Unfortunately that's what I come up with when I try to recall what was discussed. I don't think this is necessarily bad however. MS haven't tried to create the next Photoshop, Flash and Flexbuilder which would have been a far easier concept for me to digest and relay. Far from it in fact, these tools are intended to address designer-developer work-flow issues and suggest new approaches to developing engaging user experiences. The end result isn't to offer something staggeringly different but to offer an alternative journey to get there. I.E "You can already do that in Flash" isn't the argument: "This is how you do it in Flash, this is how it's done in Expression. Which is most suitable for our project?" is what is on the table.