BANGALORE, INDIA: Expression studio is package provided by Microsoft for design and media application and is directed towards developers and designers.

Expression studio contains four fully functional components that can be used to create high quality graphics, web presentations or user interface. Using this product Microsoft is trying to create a environment where designers and code developers can work on same set of tools and resources thus giving both great flexibility to achieve desired design and functionality that in turn will provide great user experience. Better user experience is the idea around which Expression studio was developed.

Expression Blend

Expression Blend is a user interface design tool by Microsoft to simplify building graphical interface for web and desktop applications. It was built using .NET framework 3.0 and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). Expression blend uses XAML a new markup language that can describe presentation surface of application. Using this tool one can easily build interactive design and even animate as most of functionality to achieve these tasks is integrated in this tool. As one builds interface in Expression studio XAML code generates that can be exported to Visual Studio 2008 where code developer can add logic to it. Expression blend also supports development of Silver light (Microsoft's Flash like plug in for browsers) projects for enhancing web experience.

Expression Web

Expression web is a tool to create modern superior quality web sites for enhancing user experience in web domain. Using it one can integrate XML, CSS, ASP.NET, XHTML and JavaScript into web page thus providing developer a single tool that takes care of most of web site development needs. Expression web uses its own standard based rendering engine.

Expression Design

Expression design is a vector and raster graphic design tool to help designer build appealing graphics. The graphics created in this tool can be exported (using XAML) to other tools of Expression studio to add logic and animation.

Expression Media

Expression media is a Digital Asset Management tool provided in Expression studio suit. It is designed to catalogue most of the formats used by professional users that include raw image formats, multi-layer Photoshop files and common JEPG and GIF formats. Expression Media also supports various video and music formats. Using this tool user can visually organize and categorize his/her digital assets for effective retrieval. On top of this Expression Media also provide features like conversion to other formats, web gallery output and slideshow.

Expression Encoder

Along with these four tools Expression Studio also comes with Expression Encoder a tool to encode digital audio and video media. Expression media comes with command line control and can be used to create compressed video (VC-1 format) ready for Silver light.

Bottomline: Expression Studio from Microsoft attempts to bridge the gap between a designer and developer by providing a unified development environment.