Product Reviews

You may have noticed that Microsoft has a new operating system on the way, Windows Vista. Central to its interface is the Windows Presentation Foundation and the WinFX API, now renamed .NET Framework 3. The new suite of design applications is designed to integrate with Vista development tools by exporting in the new XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) interface format, ready to plug into Visual Studio.

Expression Graphic Designer

Vector and bitmap graphics are central to any design suite, and Microsoft has ambitiously chosen to tackle both in the same product. However, it's taken a shortcut by buying up the long-standing Expression package from Hong Kong developer Creature House. The downside is that while this is a powerful package for an apparent first release, the interface is both fussy and dated and that's carried through here. Unless some radical changes are made, the working environment won't be that of a supposedly next-generation application.

Underneath the interface, though, there's huge potential. Key to this is the use of skeletal strokes. Each one is essentially a path, along which other vector elements or bitmaps are repeated or stretched. The results can look like anything from pen strokes or airbrushes, through to photo-realistic ropes or columns of marching ants. Plenty of preset strokes are provided, and it's simple to create your own. Also, because of their vector underpinning, each stroke's path, width and formatting remain fully editable.

Alongside this system, Microsoft has extended the power of Expression in several ways. The addition of Live Effects is especially powerful, making it possible to apply a range of filter effects to both bitmap and vector-based objects. Options include core colour corrections, such as varying hue, saturation and brightness, along with more artistic filters. Like the skeletal strokes, each live effect can be fine-tuned retrospectively.

Most impressive is the work Microsoft has put into developing Expression's bitmap capabilities. Now you can add a bitmap-based pixel layer as easily as you can a vector layer, with the toolset on offer changing accordingly. The range of pixel-based brushes is extensive, and you're also able to edit and create your own using a component system. You can add 3D depth effects too, and control whether underlying paint is picked up by your brush strokes. Bitmap rushes can also apply basic retouching effects such as cloning, blurring, sharpening and red-eye removal. It's all powerful and creative stuff, but Photoshop certainly isn't under any threat.

Although serious photo editing is out of the picture, Expression Graphic Designer is an excellent graphical partner to other applications. You'll be able to copy and paste vector and bitmap graphics into Office applications complete with full alpha channel transparency support - particularly useful for creating eye-catching PowerPoint presentations. This is buggy in current builds, but it holds huge promise. With its Pixel Preview and HTML Export, it's also possible to create rollovers for use in Visual Studio, FrontPage and Web Designer. And with XAML support, you're able to design graphics that you can then bring alive in Expression Interactive Designer.

It's this level of integration, as well as the combined vector and pixel-based power, that leaves Expression Graphic Designer looking like a highly creative all-rounder. We just hope the interface can be tweaked slightly to reveal a little more of that.

Expression Web Designer

Another area where Microsoft is looking to boost its design credentials is the web. Its current offering, FrontPage, has changed radically in recent years, but its original poor support for standards means it will never gain professional acceptance compared to the likes of GoLive or, particularly, Dreamweaver. But Expression Web Designer already looks like a much more serious contender.

By keeping the underlying code of a web page exposed, it's a major progression from FrontPage, which did its best to keep it hidden. While Expression Web Designer is built around a main wysiwyg-layout window, it also offers tabbed access to code and split code/design views, and is bordered by technical task panes reminiscent of an advanced programming environment. It's much more serious and professional than FrontPage, but usability hasn't been forgotten - the latest CTP can already show Dreamweaver a thing or two about efficiency and productivity.

Ultimately, though, it's the quality and browser compatibility of the outputted code that will determine its professional acceptance and whether the ghost of FrontPage can be laid to rest. Here, Microsoft is making all the right noises about standards compliance and, crucially, each page can be based on a doctype, to which all code will then conform. You can also set a secondary schema for the compatibility checker so that otherwise correct code which isn't supported, say in IE6 or IE5, is flagged.

By default, Expression Web Designer outputs XHTML 1 Transitional code, cutting out much of the complication associated with formatting tags. Instead, the XHTML is styled with CSS (cascading style sheets), for which the

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support looks exemplary. With dedicated task panes for applying styles, as well as a CSS Properties pane, you can see just what rules are feeding into the current formatting and edit them accordingly.

Ultimately, it's XHTML/CSS code presented to the web browser to display, but for scalable sites with rapidly changing content it's important to ensure that each page and page element can be swiftly designed and coded. Particularly useful here is the ability to process XML-based data sources, such as live RSS feeds. Expression Web Designer makes this task as simple as possible by taking care of the XSL Transformations behind the scenes, while the end user can simply drag and drop elements from the Data View task pane.

For server-based processing of data, Expression Web Designer offers strong handling of Microsoft's own ASP.NET 2 standard, including drag-and-drop access to controls, support for nested master pages, full compatibility with Visual Studio 2005 and a built-in Development Server that lets you preview your site locally. This goes a long way to making advanced dynamic web applications as simple to create as static pages; it may also drive the take-up of ASP.NET 2 itself. It's an impressive showing, but if you want to use other server languages (JSP, PHP, ColdFusion or even older versions of ASP) there's currently no support for them.

While Microsoft's conversion to standards remains in question, the streamlined power of Web Designer means that, in certain areas at least, Dreamweaver may finally be facing some real competition.

Expression Interactive Designer

Although it's the smallest download at just over 6MB for the installer, Interactive Designer is the application on which Microsoft is pinning many of its hopes for the development of application GUIs that move on from XP. It wants WinFX/WPF everywhere, and Interactive Designer is certainly the fastest way to achieve that.

The working environment is built on a central art board, with a series of docked palettes to the right and a timeline below. As you'd expect from a program designed for creating user interfaces, it's fresh, modern and efficient. In particular, the interface as a whole is adaptive and intelligent. The application itself requires the installation of WinFX and uses it to good effect: it's a great showcase for entirely vector-based interfaces. For example, if you use the new Workspace Zoom feature, the size of the icons and text in all palettes increases or shrinks accordingly, with palettes closing and opening depending on the space available.

Looking at the main Toolset palette, there are options for drawing shapes and text, which can be formatted with solid fills, linear or radial gradients and vector or bitmap patterns, with the same options available to control transparency. External media formats are also supported currently in the form of JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF for bitmaps, WMA and WAV for audio, WMV for video and OBJ for 3D. All elements can be brought to life using the Timeline, which offers property based animation, and, using the Camera Orbit tool, you can even apply After Effects-style 3D effects to imported images.

Graphics and media handling are important to Expression Interactive Designer, but the program's real focus is interactivity. This is primarily handled through the Library palette, from which you can add dozens of preset UI controls. The usual suspects - checkboxes, combo boxes, list boxes and buttons - are catered for alongside more advanced options such as grid, dock and stack, letting you create your own adaptive layouts. All content-based UI controls can be bound to external XML- or CLR-based data sources, and Expression Interactive Designer makes this as simple as possible. Simply drag and drop elements from the Data palette, and the program suggests viable controls and sets up the necessary binding.

Code-free data handling like this is impressive, but eventually you need to get your hands dirty to tell your interface exactly how it should behave when run. At first sight, it looks as though the place to do this is in the Code tab of the art board, which reveals how the interface you've built up is written in Microsoft's new XAML. You can directly edit the code here, but it's dangerous: if you make a mistake, your carefully crafted interface will fail to render back in design view until you fix it. In any case, you aren't intended to add the interactivity to your application in XAML - you write your event handlers in a "code-behind" file. This approach has definite advantages, as it separates markup from code, which is cleaner and means designers can focus on the interface while the developers get on with programming. It also enables programmers to use the language they prefer - currently a choice between C# and Visual Basic .NET. On the other hand, in the CTP as it stands, there's virtually no support for such coding, so it remains to be seen how it will work in practice.

Assuming that the process of adding interactivity to Expression Interactive Designer is successfully addressed in the release version, the potential is undeniable. In particular, the adaptive applications you create can be instantly deployed in two ways: as either a Flash-style web browser application with partial trust, or as an installed desktop application with full trust.

It's clear that while Microsoft is beginning to yield to open standards, many of the improvements these products promise to bring to the desktop and internet experiences are dependent on extensive use of its proprietary software and APIs too. Nonetheless, these works-in-progress show a lot of promise and look to inject some serious competition into the market once they're finally released. Unfortunately, dates and pricing are yet to be announced.