Microsoft Expression review

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.

Author: Tom Arah