Great decision: Expression Blend and Expression Web will be in MSDN

In case you haven’t already heard it from elsewhere we have decided to include Expression Blend and Expression Web in MSDN Premium subscriptions, and the other two Expression products (Expression Design and Expression Media) in the team suite subscription.

This is fantastic news if you’re an MSDN subscriber. Expression Blend, a tool that helps you construct slick and impressive UIs for WPF, is a great product and I know developers have been itching to get their hands on it. It’s currently in beta, scheduled for release in Q2 of this year. Although it’s actually aimed at designers it is useful for developers to see it and understand it as part of the attraction is how well it works hand-in-glove with Visual Studio.

Expression Web is a top-notch web development tool, released in December last year. I’ve spent some time using it and can confirm that a) it’s in a different world (a much better world) than Frontpage – this is a pro web design tool and b) it handles CSS better than anything I’ve ever seen.

Originally we weren’t going to include these in MSDN however we had feedback from the community (people like you) that caused us to re-evaluate that decision which lead to this announcement. To my mind this is a terrific example of us listening to the community and doing the right thing, and I'm really glad about the outcome.

Take a look at Soma's blog entry for more detail.

We will be running a number of developer events over the coming months that will include some coverage of these products so keep an eye on www.microsoft.com/uk/events for details. And I'll blog them too of course :-)