Microsoft today announced Expression Studio tools for designers and creative people. These tools work cleanly with the Visual Studio suite of tools for developers. The idea behind Expression Studio is to provide designers tools to prototype the User Interface or User Experience of new applications. But the tools produce more than just a prototype...they produce real production code that developers can integrate with their application code.
In the past new applications designs were prototyped in something like Flash or Macromedia Director to give developers a visual idea of the user experience and flow. These prototypes were thrown away once developers started building the application in something like Visual Studio. Now Designers can use Expression and hand off real code to developers who use Visual Studio. This saves a lot of time and keeps the design intent in place through the development process.
Expression Studio is comprised of several tools; Expression Web for creating standards based Web sites; Expression Blend for designing rich interactive experiences for Windows; Expression Design for the design of visual elements for Web and Windows experiences; and Expression Media, which provides digital asset management and unifies team workflow across the suite.
There is a great discussion going on Robert Scoble's blog. Here is a lucid explanation from Rory Blyth in a comment on Scoble's blog;
Blend is a development tool that allows designers and developers to pass Visual Studio applications back and forth so that the designers can “de-uglify” the interfaces created by developers (at least that’s the simple story).
Think of it this way…
Blend loads a Visual Studio project’s UI. Designer uses Blend to modify the UI so that it looks good. The designer is working with the *same* Visual Studio solution as the developer. Definitely not prototypes (unless that’s what the goal of the project is).
There are multiple tools in the Expression line, and each has a specific purpose. The purpose of Blend, again, is to unite developers and designers.
The technologies behind all of this are XAML, WPF, and WPF/e.
XAML is just the markup language that’s used to describe objects. In the case of UIs, XAML is mostly likely being used to create WPF-based interfaces.
WPF, the Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly known as “Avalon”) is Microsoft’s next generation UI toolkit.
WPF/e is a version of WPF designed to work on multiple platforms and under multiple browsers (IE, FF, etc…).
This is a big leap forward that unifies the tools and processes for designing and developing software applications. This is the kind of innovation that I was talking about in my previous post about innovation, and another post about the importance of developers in building an application platform that lasts a long, long time.
