Thank you for joining us at the CRE8 conference!
Hello! Thank you everyone for joining us at the CRE8 Conference last week at Orlando. It was an amazing experience being there with you. Thanks to everyone for being there at the keynote (early in the morning after a party! 
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After the keynote we also hosted some technical sessions. You can find the assets I used for those sessions here. The first session we had was focused on creating Silverlight using Expression Blend and Design. We went through the basics of using Design to create vector based graphics and then export those to Expression Blend. Then we learned more about Blend mainly discovering some of the differences with Flash. Like I said during the session, I like not to add adjectives before these comparisons as in “better” “worse” but simply using Flash as a point of reference given so many of us have that background. We learned a few tricks on how to do things you would normally do in Flash but now in Expression Blend. We also learned about other features, exclusive of Silverlight and Expression Blend like DeepZoom, Hand Off timelines, the ability to have any tumber of Storyboards per object (we call them Storyboards in Blend, where in Flash we call them Timelines) and to the question of “Where are my movieclips” well, we showed User Controls which is the way you do movieclip-like objects in Silverlight 2.
A surprise for you: New DeepZoom composer release! Remember the DeepZoom Brian used for the keynote? or the one we used in the Silverlight Authoring session?… you can now create those DeepZoom experiences in a snap using the new DeepZoom composer release. Kirupa, an Expression Blend Program Manager announced a new version of DeepZoom Composer. This is the release I used when showing you how to create these experiences.
Also, during CRE8, Microsoft release the version 2 of our products. That makes you all attendees very special since you where there with us right we announced this publicaly. You can check out the new site at www.microsoft.com/expression and download trials of the tools. We also welcome you to visit http://expression.microsoft.com which is the community website. Lot’s of good content there.
Please drop me any question you might have. I’d love to hear your ideas for our products and the types of features you would like us to incorporate in there. The Expression team has opened a thread for you to post your ideas. Believe me, I know these guys, the read this with passion! so post anything you like. It’s all being heard in detail. You can truly influence the creation of the tools.
