Microsoft releases Expression Studio 2

Expression Studio was released about a year and a half ago as a partial answer to Adobe's Creative Suite. In addition to Microsoft's developer push towards RIAs (including Silverlight, ASP.NET Ajax, and WPF) they needed creative tools to enable designers to build on their platform and Expression Studio was born. It's largely targeted at web technologies so it doesn't have quite the reach of Adobe's design tools but each tool in Expression Studio fills a need for Microsoft's platform. Expression Web supports HTML/Ajax design, Expression Design and Expression Blend support XAML, Microsoft's declarative graphic language, while Expression Media and Encoder are targeted at creating and managing Windows Media content. Some of the other notable features in the products include PHP and Adobe Photoshop import in Expression Web, support for RAW and the ability to geotag in Expression Media 2 and the addition of Expression Encoder 2 as a separate product as part of the suite.

In general, I think the biggest part of the release is Expression Web. I'm a big fan of the Blend product line but if you're looking to build Silverlight 2 applicaitions, Blend 2 won't help you as it only targets Silverlight 1 content. I'm also happy to see Expression Encoder be fully added to the suite. I've heard a lot of good things about Encoder and it makes it really easy to publish content right to the Silverlight Streaming service. In general I think more video is always good and Encoder looks like a solid product.

I am curious what they'll do with Blend 2.5 which allows you create content for Silverlight 2. It's currently in public preview mode and I wouldn't be surprised to see it added as an update later on to Expression Studio 2. I'm not sure if the other Expression Studio products have 2.5 versions.