Hello!

Well as promised the new Expression Blend v2 September release is *now live*. This is fully available for you to download an try out. This is still an early release so you might find some issues here and there but it’s pretty robust. You can find a detailed list of new features here. Thanks to Unni, PM in the Blend team for providing the info.

I’m particularly excited about this release because the team incorporated new features that make workflow and productivity much better. For example you can now quickly drag and drop rich assets from anywhere in Windows. This means you no longer have to go to the Project panel, right click, Add Existing Item, look for the item, say ok etc… now you simply drag and drop.  Other cool thing is the new Breadcrumb bar which will help you navigate into WPF controls much easier. We now also have a Split view which allows you to see both XAML and Design views at the same time. The new Animation capabilities are awesome… WPF and Silverlight have always supported a very rich animation system and there were two capabilities in these platforms that had not been exposed previously in Expression Blend: Vertex Animation and Spline Animation.  Vertex animation allows you to animate individual vertices in a shape which helps you create organic/natural looking animations. Spline animation allows you to control the interpolation of the movement of an object on the scene. It helps you produce effects similar to what mcTween does in Flash.  Both of these new animation features are available for both WPF and Silverligth apps.

We’ve created some videos and a landing page for Expression Blend v2 for you to watch and see how the new features work. Celso Gomes, Design in the Expression Blend team (www.nibblestutorials.net) and Dante Gagne, SDET in the Expression Blend team (presenter for Total Training) will show us some of the new features in Blend.  You can download the videos here:

Animation- Check out some of the new and exciting Animation features!

Breadcrumb - Discover how easy it is tocustomize WPF Controls with the new Breadcrumb navigation.

DragAndDrop - You can now simply drag and drop assets into Expression Blend to add the to your project.

UserControl - Draw Graphics on the art board, convert them to a User Control later.

The Converted is now supporting Silverlight conversion from SWF. They continue to support WPF conversion too… this is nice little tool, “smartly” tag priced at $48…  why $48?!, why not $49 or $47.33?  Is that the way it works in Canada? … anyway, they have a very cool gallery with conversion samples…

Electric Rain has a more ambitious project though… it’s called Harmony… it’s in the oven but we should hear about it soon.

If you want to find more XAML converters, the master is Mike Swanson. He leads most of our interactions with software vendors related to XAML adoption and has also put together some cool events like the XAML Conversion Contest. Photoshop to XAML? Autocad’s DWF/DXF to XAML? OBJ to XAML? 3DS, Lightwave to XAML?…  they have it all there…

Today is a good day, a happy day. We are releasing Silverlight 1.0! As I mentioned before there are no breaking changes between the last RC release and this, the final release so all your apps should continue to work just fine. Now that Silverlight 1.0 is released, we’ll see a huge wave of online experiences taking advantage of it. While Silverlight was still under development there were hundreds of experiences under development… we’ll start seeing how all these are made public little by little while others start being developed and designed… check out these samples: Microsoft.com now uses Silverlight!, MSN is also a huge adopter of Silverlight, check out their new US Presidential Election Podium… and it is also about showbiz right? so here is a brand new Halo 3 website created using Silverlight! lovely…  Microsoft owns some of top visited websites in the world like Microsoft.com, MSN, Live so it is evident we are adopting Silverlight a 100% but it’s not only us… as announced and shown during MIX, big partners are already working on Silverlight experiences and today we are announcing other big players jumping into Silverlight: Entertainment Tonight (ET), Home Shopping Network and World Wrestling Entertainment are going live with Silverlight too.

It is also a good day because we are releasing Expression Encoder 1.0. Expression Encoder is part of Expression Media so if you own Expression Media the download of Expression Encoder will be available for you free of charge. If you do not own Media then you can get the 60 day trial (or buy Media… or Studio… why not?)   Expression Encoder helps you prepare video for the Web. It’s got really nice encoding features which are shown in these new videos in the Expression site. One of the coolest features is skinning your videos… there is a collection of skins included in Encoder and more are coming up. You can also create your own skins in Blend and then reuse in Encoder.

We will also have a new Expression Blend v2 Preview very soon. The exciting thing about it is it’s got so many new features that you will totally love! the new features are particularly about Animation as well as Workflow… I honestly think this will be the coolest Blend released since we showed the new UI more than a year ago. I know I know, I’m just teasing you… you wanna see it… it’ll be here soon I promise

Congrats to the Silverlight platform team, the product management teams, DPE and everyone else who was part of making Silverlight 1.0 available. Also congrats to the Expression Encoder team, a team with great people who totally “love video”. Congrats to the Expression Encoder Product Management team too! yes, you Jim.

So, I’ve kept poking around with some ideas for this blog… I just decided I don’t want to do a typical blog with text like the one you are reading right now… (my backend blog posting, management environment might remain WordPress but I want to do something different with the UI). I’m thinking in doing something less common. Might be a good excercise to find new ways to express the UI of a Blog. I have so many sketchbooks so I’m leaning towards a more visual blog.

One of the things I like is doing charts and diagrams… perhaps due to my background as an architect (not software but “house/building” kinda architect)… I’ve done some of the graphics and charts for my team here in Microsoft like the Silverlight poster I designed for MIX07. I like to do those kind of charts or graphics as design exercises so what I’m thinking is doing my blog using charts… small, little, long, tall… I’m trying to define how these will be layed out in the browser space… spread out? in clusters? with any timeline ordering? coloring? animation?… Even if the blog becomes graphic driven I still want to enable syndication (RSS)… how will I achieve that?…  there are more questions than answers but I’ll be taking little decisions soon. That is good way of designing, break down the problem in little problems. I like to walk or run while I think about a design… visualizing while doing a physical activity helps me isolate for the real world and immerge myself into a “conscious dream”.