MS Expression
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- Llyod
has anybody here given this a whole hearted try?
http://www.microsoft.com/express…
And if so what's the verdict?
- jar0
i'm curious to know this myself. i work pretty closely with our dev team who've decided (today in fact) that i should start working with this as soon as, apparently integration of design against back-end is "so much simpler", scepticle of the design tools though (as an adobe user on mac i'm naturally scepticle) but if it makes my life easier and it's another skill, then why not.
blend cd should land on my desk any time soon, i'll let you know!
- jfletcher0
I took training in it (but had to leave half way through).
It's a good idea that needs more time. Silverlight and the Expression technology will be good once it gets going, and help out designers a lot to develop strong UI's and UX's.There are some deal breakers that make me not use it yet (crisp lines in designer, consistent hotkeys, and a few other things). Given it's a v.1, it will get fixed. I was actually talking to the team a few weeks ago, and they are well aware of the issues.
I know a lot of poeple will bitch and rail because it's MS, but get over it. Last time I checked, Adobe wasn't the intuitive capital of the design world :)
- heavyt0
after a breif experience with it, i got the impression that it is only slightly better than FrontPage. There was still a fair amount of license taken with the code. (ie. it writes a bunch of extra code that you dont really need.)
For windows, I think Visual Studio is still the better way to go. Otherwise, Dreamweaver. I just dont think that you are gonna catch a lot of people dying for another MS product when there are so many alternatives out there.
- Llyod0
how about vs photoshop/illustrator?
- stupidresponse0
yeah, i'm all over this. i think i might try to pick up bubonic plague and do a bit of home eye surgery while i'm at it.
- ninjasavant0
The big problem I see is that using it assumes your dev team is working with a MS architecture like .net and writing its front end in XAML. To my knowledge there isn't any easy way to convert existing code and graphics into that format. Beyond that, none of my dev teams use .net or XAML so I basically try to smack the idea down anytime a developer or starts to wonder about it.
As for how it is vs PS and IL, yes it is more integrated with a dev environment but its definitely not what you're used to and seems to be a single environment tool.
That said, I have been pushing Flex as a dev environment and that has been getting some traction. I think the Flex/Air combo is far more open and will end up on top of the pile in the long run.
- jfletcher0
We've been using Flex/Air with some success. It's been good thus far.
Yeah, MS does tend to add some crap in the XAML. Not as bad as FrontPage, but still not as clean as you'd want to see.
- thismanslife0
Flex/Air is gaining huge ground already. I don't know anyone developing Silverlight driven stuff.
- jfletcher0
Silverlight + 2008 Olympics...
small things :)