yesterday I went to a microsoft event where basically they pimped 3 new products they have. By the way don’t expect any detailed notes from the event cause I forgot to take any so this is all from memory.
The first product is Expression
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx
The one in particular he was showing was Expression Web and kinda oddly he (the microsoft presenter) said the Web part had been dropped and it was being shipped as Expression but looking at the link above it appears he was wrong.
Anyway Expression Web to me seems to be a direct replacement for Microsoft Frontpage and I gotta say thank god. Being a Dreamweaver user I found too many problems with frontpage. Expression had some nice features like being able to move css classes from pages to stylesheets without having to open the stylesheet. Some nice plug-in’s to visual studio as well including the creation of Master Pages. I think I might download the demo and have a play around with it…I would recommend it, seems to be a big improvement on Frontpage.
By the way there was another Expression product that we saw only fleetingly but I would describe it as a challenger to Illustrator. Not 100% sure but I think it was the Expression Design product. It was vector based but like I say we didn’t see much of this product.
That was the only product on release just now, the other 2 being beta’s.
The 2nd one we saw was ASP.Net Ajax
To be honest I didn’t learn a lot from the presentation. They kinda just went over everything I already knew so I found this a little disappointing. Speaking to some other developers who have been playing with Ajax they were telling me about some bugs and I would say I am gonna play around with this sometime soon but I am expecting problems. Might wait until the official release rather than the beta.
And the third was WPFE (Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb188266.aspx
I have to be honest and say that I think this product will struggle in the market. It is Microsofts attempt to topple Flash. It doesn’t rely on Actionscript or even JavaScript but has more of an XML coding structure.
It is their attempt to make a more developer orientated graphics tool but I don’t think it’ll work. Most people who work with Flash aren’t developers. The percentage I would say come from design backgrounds or Flash might be their first exposure to coding. They are the ones you’re asking to buy it. A developer with 5 years c# experience either by now has learned to use Flash by themselves or rely on someone else to produce Flash for them.
It coded clunky, it wasn’t smooth, even the presenter had trouble getting a small demo to work and when it did, in a browser it looked like Flash. If this is going to work personally I’m going to wait for Version 3 cause I can’t see it toppling Flash. If it gets to Version 3 then it might have a chance of becoming an alternative to Flash but I can’t see it toppling. Of the 3 products I seen yesterday I gotta say this is the one I wouldn’t recommend.
Like I say I’m sorry I didn’t take detailed notes and that this is all from memory but I hope this has at least been of some interest 
