Welcome to the Expression team blog!

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Hi, we’re glad to have you visit the Expression team’s blog - we hope you’ll like the resources and information you find here and we hope you’ll return often to see what’s new.

This introductory post will talk about what the Expression family of products is. It will also talk about the blog itself, what it’s for, and what kinds of things you can expect to find here over the coming months.

So, first, what is Expression? Microsoft Expression is a suite consisting of three products each intended for use mainly by the professional designer community. Expression Graphic Designer is a visual arts package equally at home with vector or with bitmap graphics. Expression Interactive Designer gives interaction designers the environment in which to build Windows applications for the Windows Presentation Foundation platform - in other words, to build the new Vista-wave generation of Windows user experiences. Expression Web Designer is the product which offers all the tools you’ll need to produce high-quality, standards-based Web sites.

For lots more information, videos and downloads about Expression, please see the Microsoft Expression product website.

Now, about the blog. The blog’s scope embraces all three Expression products so there will be a great diversity of resources to be found here, all brought together with the intention of being of interest to designers and to the designer sensibility. Although we expect professional designers to be our main audience, if you’re a design dilettante or a Windows or Web developer, please feel free to dive in and experience and enjoy Expression too!

In the Article Categories section of the blog, you will find up-to-date directories of sample applications, tutorials and visual artwork. As the names indicate, these samples are targeted at particular pre-release or Community Technology Preview (CTP) versions of the Expression products.

In the same section there are also articles which contain the ‘readme’ files for particular pre-release or CTP versions of the Expression products.

The types of blog posts you can expect to see include these:

  • Posts announcing a new sample application or tutorial. By way of documentation, samples will include an overview document if not a tutorial, and any code will have explanatory comments. The overview document might talk about the sample’s purpose and use, how it was written, the design behind the user experience, and any interesting techniques or designer-developer workflow which was experienced whilst producing it.
  • Posts containing a piece of visual artwork.
  • Posts showing a tip or trick or relating an interesting experience around using an Expression product.
  • Posts discussing features of Expression products and gauging interest in them or feedback about them.
  • Posts containing videos of an Expression product or feature demonstration.

Happy designing!

- the Expression team