Express Yourself for Half the Price!
I just got an e-mail letting me know of a 50% off promotion (for US residents) at the Microsoft Store on the Expression suite of products, including the entire Studio as well as the stand-alone components, Expression Web and Expression Blend.
So you can get Expression Blend - the sine qua non (ok, so I'm a Latin geek) for WPF and Silverlight designers - for $250, or the entire Studio for just $100 more (go ahead, you've been good this year, right?). Expression Studio, by the way, includes
- Expression Blend - the tool of choice for designers working on WPF and Silverlight applications,
- Expression Design - a professional vector-based, graphic design tool with XAML export capabilities to seamlessly integrate with Expression Blend,
- Expression Web - a standards-based Web development environment for ASP.NET and PHP (yup, PHP!),
- Expression Encoder - offering video encoding of QuickTime, avi, MPEG and more to deliver a rich experience in Silverlight applications, and
- Expression Media - a digital asset management tool to organize your video clips, illustrations, images, sound files, and more.
For those of you wanting a longer term investment (and have a little more spare change!), keep in mind that there are MSDN subscription programs as well that include some or all of the Expression products:
- Expression Profession Subscription ($999)
- Expression Studio
- Visual Studio Standard Edition
- Windows Vista Business & Ultimate
- Windows XP Professional
- Office Standard
- Visio Professional
- Project Professional
- Groove
- Virtual PC
- Parallels Desktop for Mac
- Visual Studio Team System with MSDN Premium ($5469)
- The Visual Studio Team System 2008 role selected
- VSTS Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition (5 users)
- Expression Blend
- Expression Web
- Servers
- Operating Systems
- Office
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Toolkits, SDKs and DDK
- Visual Studio Team System Team Suite with MSDN Premium ($10,939)
- Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
- VSTS Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition (5 users)
- Expression Studio
- Servers
- Operating Systems
- Office
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Toolkits, SDKs and DDKs