PDC 2005: Microsoft gives us an Expression

Microsoft sprung a bit of a surprise to many of us today.  I knew a bit about Sparkle and and Acrylic. But today Microsoft announced the Expression Suite of development tools and from what I can see, they're killer.

Expression Suite is made up of three main applications:

Scoble mentioned to me that he thought Sparkle could be a Visual Studio killer.  I don't think he means it literally but what is special about Sparkle is that it takes a lot of the development effort away from Visual Studio and puts it into Sparkle in the form of the actual look and feel portions of the app (and apparently it can handle coding as well though I haven't played with it yet).

Microsoft says that Expression is designed to let designers and developers better work together. Designers can do their visual design of an application using tools of their choice and then developers, using Sparkle or Visual Studio, can work with those designs without spending hours cutting up bitmaps or trying to recreate a "mockup". 

This is actually very similar to how we use DesktopX at Stardock.  DesktopX creates .dxpacks (DX packages are just ZIP files with the XML and scripting in them - sound familiar?) that we then use in Visual Studio.net to create the interfaces in Galactic Civilizations II.   Sparkle, from what I could see, reminds me quite a bit of Samurize (one of the widget enabling programs).  It lets people dreate widgets in a design tool.  DesktopX doesn't have a devleopment app environment but rather turns the desktop into the app environment so it is quite different from Sparkle.

I was incredibly impressed with Sparkle along with where Microsoft seems to be going with it.  Microsoft is looking to turn XAML into a universal format for applications (or at least, that's how I took it).  I think that's a terrific idea and lets developers concentrate on making good content development tools.