Expression Graphic Designer & Expression Interactive Designer... go get it!

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What is Microsoft without acronyms? Well I have some more for you EGD, EID & EWD... that's right the Acrylic, Sparkle and Quartz code names are officially dead!

Following closely on the shoes of Twelve New WPF Hands-On Labs Available for Download January 24th marks the first public CTP of Expression Interactive Designer. This build runs on either the December or January CTP releases of the WinFX runtime components.

Good on you Tim for breaking this story... also make sure you visit the Expression team blog https://blogs.msdn.com/expression/.

So what is the big deal about EID? Well it is the first product that Microsoft has created that is built completely on .NET & WinFX. That's right it has been built using WPF to be used to design WPF applications! Because EID was built against what was effectively a moving target EID shaped the development of XAML and vica-versa.

In addition to EID we have also released the 4th public CTP of Expression Graphic Designer.

If you are like me by now you are probably wondering when you'll see the first CTP of EWD... we are aiming to provide this at Mix in Las Vegas, March 20-22.

This is our first step in vastly improving the designer/developer team productivity... think of Expression and Visual Studio as the beginning of a new era of an improved software user experience on Windows and with standards based web applications.

One more thing I'd like to reinforce Tim's words...

Experiment and have fun! Just two points to remember:

  • Firstly, this is an early build of Expression - there are known bugs that could cause the app to crash. Save often and make backups if you're doing anything beyond basic experimentation;
     
  • Secondly, this is a designer tool, not a developer tool - as such, this isn't intended to look or feel like Visual Studio. If you have colleagues that are in to graphical design, share it with them and get their verdict too - perhaps you can rope some new colleagues into your latest coding project!

N.b. There are issues present in the January 2006 CTP of WinFX that may keep WPF from running correctly on processors other than an Intel Pentium 4. You may experience erratic behavior while running Expression Interactive Designer or other WPF applications on an older Intel (Pentium 3 or older) or AMD processor. These issues have been resolved, and the fixes will be included in the next CTP of WinFX.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.