Microsoft Expression Studio 2 Shows Key Improvements

Microsoft's Expression Studio 2 arrives with many eye-catching multimedia capabilities, including a streaming encoder tool that rivals some of the tools in Adobe's Creative Suite. No doubt, Microsoft is slowly building an arsenal of tools in the Expression suite to rival Adobe's tools. But the rush to compete might come with a price.

Video developer Gotuit recently filed a lawsuit claiming that Microsoft's Silverlight video metadata infringes on its patent. The company is seeking compensation for damages. Gotuit claims that Microsoft is using the same technology to make its video searchable over the Web.

With the release of Silverlight 2, Microsoft is offering improvements in video streaming with its Encoder 2 tool, which is part of the Expression Suite. But Microsoft still has to better coordinate the releases between Silverlight and the Expression Suite. Microsoft has been mismatching Expression tools and Silverlight releases from the start. Fortunately, Microsoft released an Expression Blend version that works with Silverlight 2.

Silverlight 2 comes with more Windows Presentation Foundation functionality. Microsoft is taking advantage of WPF in a big way. In addition, version 2 supports WS*/SOAP, Rest, RSS, POX, HTTP service, and cross-domain network access. Cross-domain networking might create new security vulnerabilities. The implications can be damaging to Silverlight's fledgling reputation. Hackers could create Web applications that transfer data across domains without the knowledge of users.

In addition, the Silverlight 2 framework includes a larger asset library with more rich controls. Silverlight 2 also supports the .Net base class with collections and generics, threading, including LINQ and data caching. The Silverlight runtime is still relatively small and compact compared with the standard .Net framework libraries.

Developing Silverlight applications requires a copy of Visual Studio 2008 and the Silverlight package installer to download the SDK, including a patch for Visual Studio so that Silverlight projects can register properly. Developers new to Silverlight will find Visual Studio's IntelliSense options to work nicely. What's more, Visual Studio can render Silverlight code in design mode. Visual Studio includes full debugging capabilities for Silverlight 2. Though primitive, developers can jump back and forth between code and the render pane to check their work in realtime.

Because Expression Blend uses the WPF vector-based engine, every element is resizable and independent of resolution. Blend works with live objects, so every graphical element or XMAL code created in the tool is immediately testable.

Blend provides tree layout structures for WPF container objects that are easy to trace and highly intuitive. Blend even allows objects to move between working panes and the workspace, allowing developers to jump between properties and the workspace seamlessly. Pretty cool stuff.

Expression Design is Silverlight's main Web graphics design tool. Like Blend, Expression Design supports live effects on a page and can even blend images. Designs are readily usable in the Silverlight runtime. Expression Design 2 also includes a nice selection of effects.

The Expression design tools still lack many features essential for building 3-D objects and animated images. We recommend using ZAM 3D, for instance, for developing 3-D objects. ZAM 3D is much more intuitive than Blend. On CodePlex, a developer wrote a XAML export script for the open-source Blender animation tool. Blender is far more sophisticated than Expression Blend. However, the export tool does not yet export animations. Hopefully, the Codeplex community will take on the task of integrating Blender output into Silverlight.

In addition to adding video files, Expression Web allows developers to embed Flash files into pages, including custom ActiveX controls. While this is a big improvement, many Web editors on the market already do this. Microsoft has gone to some lengths to work with Flash. Expression Web can now preview Flash files.