From the minute I walked in the door, I could tell this was no developer tool launch. Or at least that is what Microsoft wanted us to think. The MS Expressions Launch in NYC was like no other that I had been to. There was Feng Shui, ambient music, artsy furniture, studio lighting at the top of 7 World Trade in a giant 52 floor studio. Actually some debated if it was just a completely unfinished floor or if it was suppose to be an art studio.
Well no matter the atmosphere when it came to the business of pitching and demoing MS Expressions it was back to Microsoft basics. I hung out with Rob Zelt who may blog his own opinions, but he brought up some very good points that I missed. I will start out with a two thumbs up, but I'm an easy sell on this one. I really am a big fan of the product line {funky little quarks and all}. The one mistake from my perspective was that typical Microsoft, they took a very cool product, in a very cool atmosphere and Geeked it up. When more than half the audience was designers, start with the art man! Don't tell me about WPF, .Net 3.0, ASP.NET with AJAX 1.0 and all the technology that makes this so great.... Show me 3D, show me animation, show me shadows! Well they did get around to that stuff too, but I just think the Geek speak should have followed a grand entry. Instead I think they tried to hold the bang for the Grand Finally.
Anyway, I am jazzed about Expressions Blend! Finally a cool, industrial power design tool for the "rich client" UI. Somebody finally realized that the rest of the world has been totally distracted with something called the Web {fad} and everybody has totally neglected the client application. Well Blend rocks. The capabilities given to us with Blend are just amazing. My favorite is simply the ability to grab a dll from your app, and bind to public properties. I know I am not doing this justice. You really need to see it. But take the functionality of your custom business objects and put a Picaso UI on top of it {think beyond winforms, way beyond} and I think you'll be stoked too.
The Expressions Web is also very cool and coincidently is the only product in the suite that is actually available for purchase right now. The other parts of the suite, Expressions Blend, Expressions Design and Expressions Media will be ready in the 2nd Quarter of 2007. But you can get Betas of the tools at the Expressions Web Site. Beta 2 of Blend was just released today. I heard they cleaned up a lot in Beta 2. I can't wait to download it.
Now the one thing everybody needs to keep straight in their head is that although Expressions works with the same solution, project and class files as Visual Studio, Expressions is NOT a VS plug-in. It is a stand alone app. The reason for this is that Expressions is targeted toward designers NOT developers. Designers tend to follow a very different work flow than developers. And therefore their tools need to be different.
Well as a developer with no design staff, I guess I will become or already am as Adam Kinney calls it a "devigner". I really like the term, because honestly I can't imagine corporations allocating a budget for designers on internal applications. In most cases I do see the designer role more applicable to customer facing applications and web sites. But just as many of us have BA/Architect {Barchitect... okay maybe I'm stretching it} or the Architect / Developer I do believe in the ever shrinking IT budget realm we are already Developer/Designers. But now we have some really great tools to use to do our job a little better.
Hopefully some day I will be lucky enough to get that Utopian team of a BA, Architect, Designer, Developer and PM. But for now I will continue to where as many hats as will fit on my head without falling off. And thankfully there is another tool in the shed to make the job a little easier. I recomend that you go play with Expressions today.
--chaz the devigner ;)