Hook up with Parallels

Paul and Qixing have been talking about Expression 2 and the Expression Professional Subscription. I have been running Expression on my MacBook Pro since I arrived at Microsoft Canada in Parallels or with Bootcamp. It's been great having access to both platform, particularly for testing CSS and cross-platform browser compatibility for web development. Being able to test browsers for both the Mac and Windows has saved a lot of time during the testing of front-end web development. It's even easier to test designs across different versions of Windows by running virtual instances of each OS or browser configuration.

The Expression Professional Subscription includes:

• Expression Studio
• Visual Studio Standard
• Office Standard
• Office Visio Professional
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista Business Edition
• Virtual PC
• Parallels Desktop for Mac
• and pre-configured virtualized server environments

Having pre-configured virtualized server environments that you can load up in Virtual PC or Parallels is great. I had been doing most of web development work in TextMate, but I'd recently switched to Expression Web 2 because of the Web standards and PHP support (IntelliSense and the Expression Development Server are really great). Nishant Kothary and Tyler Simpson showed how to go from Comp to CSS to Code at Mix08.

I'm just blown away that we're able to include a copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac as part of the Expression Professional Subscription.