If you think and design visually, Expression® Studio is a perfect tool to enable you to create compelling, impactful and expressive designs for the desktop and the web. The visually rich technologies in Silverlight® and .NET offer amazing possibilities to bring your creative ideas to life using a range of design tools purpose built for the task.

Expression Web

Expression Web makes creating compliant standards-based Web sites faster and easier.

Visual Diagnostics

With a state-of-the-art design surface that generates clean CSS, you can make design decisions on the fly, knowing that you're seeing a faithful representation of the final browser-rendered page.

Drag and drop controls simplify adding rich media, such as Silverlight from Expression Blend™, Flash, and Windows Media. And advanced Photoshop file import gives you complete control over imported layers.

Code Support

And if you like to work in the code, Expression Web has you covered there too. With support for a broad range of essential Web technologies, such as PHP, JavaScript, XML/XSLT, and ASP.NET you can use the same tool for both visual design and coding.

If you work on a team with developers, use Expression Web to do what you do best - design - and make it easier for developers to do what they do best. Hand the project over to Visual Studio developers, knowing that you design will stay intact while they extend the site's functionality.

Find out more about Expression Web here »

Expression Blend

Silverlight

Expression Blend is the tool for interaction design on the Silverlight and .NET platforms and enables user experience concepts to be delivered with full fidelity, from the initial prototype to the completed project.

Since its introduction Expression Blend has helped remove the barriers and bottlenecks that have traditionally existed during the design and development process and Blend 3 has evolved the workflow further, enhancing the designer’s productivity while enabling maximum creativity within the time constraints designers work under on a daily basis.

Wireframe

Visual designers can continue using the efficient workflows that you’ve built around Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, once imported your assets retain their full fidelity and editability. Rapidly turn static Photoshop graphics or visual elements drawn in Expression Blend into rich data bound controls such as a custom sliders, scrollbars and listboxes.

The ability to quickly bring an application and static graphics to life is powerful. Complex interactions can be encapsulated into simple reusable elements called Behaviors that as a designer you can easily apply via drag and drop, without writing any code.

Wireframe

Building great applications requires both great design and great development for the application to reach its full potential. The powerful design and development workflow between Expression Blend and Visual Studio allows you to share projects, code, assets and designs for higher productivity and quality. No conversion, no recreation of graphics in code is needed, simply a silky smooth two-way workflow from designer to developer and back again.

Powerful tools and streamlined workflows are more important today than ever. Expression Blend delivers a solution where your concepts and ideas can live through the entire project, end to the end, helping reduce wasted time and resources and deliver applications that exceed your client’s expectations for design, interactivity and usability.

Find out more about Expression Blend here »

SketchFlow

Flowchart

Rapid prototyping and iteration of your ideas is now possible through SketchFlow. SketchFlow prototypes are fast, easy and inexpensive to build, making it possible to create, explore and compare multiple ideas before moving forward with a solution.

Traditionally prototypes are generally redundant after the concept phase and discarded. SketchFlow enables you to leverage any of the previous conceptual work, every asset and component created is reusable in your production project – no asset need go to waste.

Personalized Media

You are able to rapidly evolve your prototypes utilizing the full functionality of Expression Blend 3 with no limit to the scope of a prototype. Mock-up functional, data-driven user interfaces with data binding and sample data. Apply rich interactivity with Behaviors, without writing code, using extensible libraries of packaged interactivity building blocks. The ability to integrate with existing workflows by importing Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files at full fidelity; preserving layers, vectors and even most text formatting accelerates your workflow further.

From simple prototypes that are wireframes featuring low fidelity visuals to prototypes that are high fidelity, fully interactive and data driven, SketchFlow gives you the flexibility to experiment, evolve and demonstrate your concepts and ideas to clients in the most effective way possible. You have total flexibility and total control from concept to completion.

Find out more about SketchFlow here »

Expression Design

Expression Design is a professional design tool for creating graphics content that can be used within the authoring applications in Expression Studio: Expression Blend and Expression Web.

Utilize Design Assets

Expression Design with its range of powerful importing, slicing and exporting capabilities is the perfect complementary product to Expression Blend and Expression Web. Target both WPF and Silverlight projects in Expression Blend, export individual or multiple graphics as well as complete layouts as XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language). Expression Web can utilize JPEG, GIF, PNG and Silverlight assets as well as full HTML compositions you exported from Expression Design.

A fully featured professional design surface gives the user visual creativity and the assurance that the underlying code being created is clean and purposeful. Users have confidence that what they see in the export dialog is a direct reflection of the final output of the finished project.

Find out more about Expression Design here »

Expression Encoder

Expression Encoder 3 provides the power of industry leading encoding, in a simple approachable interface to make it easy to prepare video for use in a variety of ways, including Silverlight on the Web.

Encoding For Everyone

Video in a wide range of formats can be imported, simple edits made and graphic overlays added before a simple set of controls allow you to choose the right setting for your needs. The resulting encoded video can then be housed in a range of customizable player skins ready for instant deployment to the Web or a range of devices.

Finally, you can use the brand new Expression Encoder screen capture application to record from your screen with webcam and microphone support to produce demo and training materials, again encoded to meet your needs.

Find out more about Expression Encoder here »

An effective, streamlined and powerful designer and developer workflow is imperative to deliver the types of compelling and engaging web sites, web applications and desktop experiences that clients expect today.

Expression® Studio, Visual Studio and traditional design tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator combined with .NET, Silverlight® and the standards based web enable the delivery of compelling results to your customers time after time, while maximizing the investments you’ve already made in the tools and technologies you employ today.

Expression Web

Code

If you think and breathe code, Expression Web makes creating compelling standards-based Web sites faster and easier.

Expression Web's professional code editor speeds development with IntelliSense and color-coding for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Choose from a wide range of schema and Expression Web 3 will help you build appropriate code with a compatibility checker that highlights non-conforming elements.

Visual Diagnostics

Expression Web also speeds the essential task of debugging sites across multiple browsers with SuperPreview. You can debug your pages in multiple browsers on the same machine that you use for development without waiting for a Web service. SuperPreview not only shows how your pages will look, but also identifies the problem elements so you can quickly find them in your code.

Once you've identified an error, Snapshot Preview helps you fix it faster by displaying a high-fidelity browser rendering that updates live as you edit your code, saving you the time and effort of loading the page in a browser for each code change.

Code Support

With support for a range of scripting and server-side languages, Expression Web provides the flexibility to use the right mix of essential technologies. Expression Web supports PHP, HTML/XHTML, XML/XSLT, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, Flash, Windows Media, and Photoshop as well as seamless integration with Microsoft® Visual Studio and Expression Studio.

If you work on a team with designers, use Expression Web to do what you do best - develop - and make it easier for designers to do what they do best. You can take their design and easily extend functionality thanks to seamless integration with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Find out more about Expression Web here »

Expression Blend™

If you are looking to build applications that have cutting edge, compelling user experiences then you need to include a powerful interaction design tool like Expression Blend as part of your workflow. Since its introduction Expression Blend has helped break the down barriers and bottlenecks between design and development that have previously existed and hindered the application development process.

Silverlight

The smooth XAML workflow and shared project format between Expression Blend and Visual Studio as well as the ability to leverage industry proven technologies; Silverlight, WPF, XAML, C#, and VB, enable you to deliver applications that are stable, scalable, accessible, reliable and secure while maintaining optimal performance.

Expression Blend 3 includes a full code editor with XAML, C# and VB intelliSense, which means as a developer you no longer have to leave Expression Blend to write code, increasing your productivity and minimizing your application switching.

Behaviors

You don’t need to write procedural code for interactivity anymore; instead you can encapsulate complex design interactions into reusable behaviors. A behavior can be directly applied to a user interface element via drag and drop and then have its attributes refined via any properties the developer has exposed. Behaviors are easily shareable across other projects and with other users of Blend.

A constraint of building effective user experiences in the past has been the reliance of the user interface on data. Expression Blend 3 introduces design time sample data making it easy to build data-connected applications without access to live data. You can build unique design time sample data sets which can be utilized easily by a designer within Expression Blend which is important as designing with appropriate sample data allows UI issues to surface much earlier in the design cycle. The sample data source can then be seamlessly swapped for a live data connection by you to enable testing and easy integration with the customer’s production environments.

Rich Content

The streamlined design and development workflow available between Expression Blend, Visual Studio and the tools your designers use help you to deliver compelling, cutting edge solutions, in rapid time and on budget to your clients.

Find out more about Expression Blend here »

SketchFlow

SketchFlow enables you to rapidly create and prototype new ideas and effectively present them to your clients before evolving and delivering them as completed projects.

Flowchart

Traditional prototypes are generally redundant after the concept phase and are discarded. SketchFlow is different, it enables you to leverage all the conceptual ideas, components, behaviors and resources expressed via the SketchFlow prototype and use them as the starting point for the next phase of the project.

The ability to rapidly prototype multiple branches through an application and propose multiple different functional layouts for screens and then deliver these as an interactive prototype is an exceptionally powerful way of engaging your client.

Styled Controls

SketchFlow helps you keep the client focus on the overall solution rather than the detail early in the prototype stage by visualizing concepts and layouts using SketchFlow’s built in ‘sketchy’ styled controls. Once you are ready to demonstrate a prototype to your client you can solicit immediate feedback via the SketchFlow player.

Customers can test the concepts you are prototyping without installing any software on their machines, adding their thoughts through annotated comments which can then be viewed directly on the design surface within SketchFlow. This enables you to iterate quickly on feedback and once your customer signs off on a concept you can move quickly from a prototype to production project, which enables you to maximize your investment from the concept phase.

Find out more about SketchFlow here »

Whether you're an expert or just getting started, building standards-based Web sites is faster and easier with Microsoft® Expression® Web 3.

Create compelling Web sites visually

Visual Diagnostics

If you think and create visually, use the state-of-the-art design surface to layout your Web page. You can make design decisions on the fly, knowing that you're seeing a faithful representation of the final browser-rendered page.

Drag and drop controls simplify adding rich media, such as Silverlight from Microsoft Expression Blend™, Silverlight® video, Adobe Flash, and Windows Media. And advanced Adobe Photoshop file import gives you complete control over imported layers and transparency.

Create standards-based Web sites faster & easier

Code Support

If you think and breathe code, Expression Web has you covered there too with flexible support for a wide range of essential technologies: PHP, HTML/XHTML, XML/XSLT, CSS, JavaScript, ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, Flash, Photoshop files, and video/audio for webcasting.

Expression Web speeds the essential task of cross-browser debugging. With SuperPreview, you don’t need a Web service to debug your pages on the same machine that you use for development. SuperPreview not only shows a high-fidelity rendering of how pages will look on different browsers, but it also identifies the element’s tag, size and position, applied styles, and location in the DOM (Document Object Model) tree so you can quickly fix the error.

SuperPreview

Once you’ve identified an error, Snapshot Preview helps you fix it faster. By displaying a high-fidelity browser rendering that updates as you edit your code, Snapshot Preview saves you the time and effort of loading the page in a browser for each code change.

If you're a designer or developer, use Expression Web to do what you do best. And if you're part of a diverse team, sharing an Expression Web project has never been easier thanks to seamless integration with Expression Studio and Visual Studio.

Find out more about Expression Web here »

Expression Web 3 also includes the following full applications:

Utilize Design Assets

Microsoft Expression Design 3 is the perfect companion to Expression Web. Leverage existing artwork, or use intuitive drawing tools to quickly build sophisticated vector assets. Seamlessly transfer them to your Expression Web projects knowing that their fidelity will be maintained throughout the entire designer-developer workflow.

Find out more about Expression Design here »

Encoding For Everyone

Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 encodes a wide array of video file formats so you can stream live video from webcams and camcorders or screen capture your PC. Make simple edits to video files and enhance your media with overlays and advertising. Choose encoding settings, choose from a range of player templates and publish rich media experiences with Microsoft Silverlight.

Find out more about Expression Encoder here »

In many industries, an effective user experience determines the difference between products that fail and those that do not. Rich Internet Applications are designed to provide a more effective and compelling user experience.

Expression® Studio and Silverlight® have been designed from the ground up to make it easier to succeed when creating these experiences by focusing on three key areas. ‘Going beyond HTML’ with richer graphics, layout, controls and video; ‘Playing well with Others’ because you need your application to work on many platforms and browsers and to connect to your existing HTML and backend web services; and enabling ‘Rapid Development’ using built in powerful .NET framework support and powerful design and development tools Expression Blend™ and Visual Studio.

Silverlight

Silverlight

Silverlight enables you to create more responsive user experiences with the fastest runtime on the Web, keeping users engaged by combining animation, video, dynamic layout, vector graphics, perspective 3D, and effects with exclusive features like Deep Zoom.

When you create applications for Silverlight you’re actually creating one application that will run equally on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari on Windows, Mac and Linux. Silverlight on different platforms and browsers has exactly the same functionality, ensuring the same experience for all your users.

Silverlight is widely regarded as having the best quality video on the web powering important events like the recent Olympic Games in China and Barack Obama’s inauguration. Using Smooth Streaming raises the quality bar to the next level and allows you to extend your viewing times further. Adjust the quality in real-time based upon the consumer’s changing bandwidth and CPU conditions and get minimal buffering and quick start-up time using HTTP adaptive streaming.

Expression Blend

Expression Blend is a powerful interaction design tool for both Silverlight and the .NET platforms.

Personalized Media

Since its introduction Expression Blend has helped remove the barriers and bottlenecks that have traditionally existed during the design and development process and Blend 3 has evolved the workflow further, enhancing the designer’s productivity while enabling maximum creativity within the time constraints designers’ work under on a daily basis.

Visual designers can continue using the efficient workflows that you’ve built around Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, once imported your assets retain their full fidelity and editability. Rapidly turn static Photoshop graphics or visual elements drawn in Expression Blend into rich data bound controls such as a custom sliders, scrollbars and listboxes.

Visual Diagnostics

Developers can build applications on top of the powerful .NET platform, delivering applications created with one tool set that run across different browsers and platforms through Silverlight and WPF.

The ability to quickly bring an application and static graphics to life is powerful. Complex interactions can be encapsulated by developers into simple reusable elements called Behaviors that a designer can easily apply via drag and drop, without writing any code.

Design and Develop

Building great applications requires both great design and great development for the application to reach its full potential. The powerful design and development workflow between Expression Blend and Visual Studio allow designers and developers to share projects, code, assets and designs for higher productivity and quality. No conversion, no recreation of graphics in code is needed, simply a silky smooth two-way workflow from designer to developer and back again.

This superior workflow is made possible through the use of XAML across Expression Blend, Visual Studio, Silverlight and WPF. XAML separates the code from the design and enables designers and developers to simultaneously iterate on both the design and code aspects of the application.

Rich Content

Powerful tools and streamlined workflows are more important today than ever. Expression Blend delivers a solution where your concepts and ideas can live through the entire project, end to the end, helping reduce wasted time and resources and deliver applications that exceed your client’s expectations for design, interactivity and usability.

Find out more about Expression Blend here »

SketchFlow

Rapid prototyping and iteration of your ideas is now possible through SketchFlow. SketchFlow prototypes are fast, easy and cheap to build – cheap enough to be disposable, so you can explore many ideas during the design process.

Flowchart

The ability to rapidly prototype multiple branches through an application and propose multiple different functional layouts for screens and then deliver these as an interactive prototype is an exceptionally powerful way of engaging your client.

SketchFlow helps you keep the client focus on the overall solution rather than the detail early in the prototype stage by visualizing concepts and layouts using SketchFlow’s built in ‘sketchy’ styled controls.

The interactive prototypes created with SketchFlow help you find navigation and application flow issues early in the development cycle helping you and the client save time and money.

Evolve prototypes utilizing the full functionality of Expression Blend 3 - there is no limit to the scope of a prototype. From a simple wireframe to examples that are fully data driven and high fidelity, a prototype can be as real as a project or client demands.

The ability to feedback via the SketchFlow player enables the client to feel empowered. Annotated feedback is viewable by the design and development teams directly in-context on the design surface in SketchFlow. This ensures the rapid iteration of ideas and open two way dialog between you and your client.

With SketchFlow and Expression Blend 3 concepts and ideas can live through the entire project, end to the end, helping reduce wasted time and resources and deliver applications that exceed your client’s expectations for design, interactivity and usability.

Find out more about SketchFlow here »