Microsoft Expression Studio 2 Ships

Microsoft announced this morning the release of Expression Suite 2 to manufacturing – a suite of design products primarily aimed at creating the latest and greatest rich internet applications (RIAs).

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/features

The suite of professional design tools includes:

• Expression Web 2
• Expression Blend 2
• Expression Design 2
• Expression Media 2
• Expression Encoder 2

Am really looking forward to getting my hands on this because it integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 – finally bringing Microsoft’s software development suite into a much more designer oriented world alongside the amazing .NET developer programming environment they’ve delivered over the years.

The new Expression 2 products contain 100 new features and, most importantly, introduce new Microsoft Silverlight functionality for creating just gorgeous cross-browser, cross-platform Web Experiences.

All in all, very excited about this.

One thing that does annoy me however, is the fact that while they are prepared to give the entire Expression Studio away to Students for free under their newly announced DreamSpark program, paying MSDN Customers are only getting a subset of the Expression 2 product suite… something doesn’t quite add up there…!

Nokia First To Take Advantage of Silverlight

Today, Nokia signed a deal with Microsoft which will bring Rich Internet Application technology ‘Silverlight’ to millions of mobile phones.

I posted about new rich Microsoft Silverlight user-interface technology in the context of Microsoft Surface last week… now we see mobile device vendors beginning to sign up for this rich experience…

Silverlight is a very-much up-and-coming competitor to Adobe Flash which is already used by popular web sites such as YouTube… only Silverlight is better including better HD video support, and better, easier and more logical programming model – built from the ground up for fully-functional, cross-platform rich internet applications.

Nokia will initially make Silverlight available on its high-end smart phones, specifically the S60 model running a Symbian operating system, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablet devices.

Microsoft demonstrated Silverlight on the S60 during the keynote at MIX08 conference today. The Windows Mobile version on Silverlight will be available later this year.

Microsoft Surface and Silverlight 2

Microsoft Surface was first announced a few years ago, and there’s been lots more talk about this year as it has become more productised.

If you haven’t heard about Microsoft Surface, then click the following link for an intro:

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Think this is really cool and would love to see it transferred to next-generation laptop/desktop screens…

Surface is going to be cool and seems to be drawing an increasing amount of attention… but what about the developer side of this…??? It looks like Microsoft Silverlight, Expression Blend, WPF and XAML are going to play a big part in the application development of all this… have been looking at all of these more and more and self-teaching… Microsoft Silverlight 2 is due out pretty soon which will include .NET Framework coding support and usher in the next generation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) in direct competition to Adobe Air and open-source Adobe Flex 3 which Adobe just released yesterday morning… .NET coders are going to love Silverlight because it builds upon their existing skills and toolsets and really does allow designers and developers to work separately but together, and for the first time their code will work in any mainstream browser on any mainstream operating system!

Scott Guthrie posted a really good intro to Silverlight 2 earlier in the week… click here…

There’s some more up-to-date videos of this from CES 2008 in Las Vegas…

This one’s just a generic demo…