Express Yourself for Half the Price!

I just got an e-mail letting me know of a 50% off promotion (for US residents) at the Microsoft Store on the Expression suite of products, including the entire Studio as well as the stand-alone components, Expression Web and Expression Blend.

So you can get Expression Blend - the sine qua non (ok, so I'm a Latin geek) for WPF and Silverlight designers - for $250, or the entire Studio for just $100 more (go ahead, you've been good this year, right?).  Expression Studio, by the way, includes

• Expression Blend - the tool of choice for designers working on WPF and Silverlight applications,
• Expression Design - a professional vector-based, graphic design tool with XAML export capabilities to seamlessly integrate with Expression Blend,
• Expression Web - a standards-based Web development environment for ASP.NET and PHP (yup, PHP!),
• Expression Encoder - offering video encoding of QuickTime, avi, MPEG and more to deliver a rich experience in Silverlight applications, and
• Expression Media - a digital asset management tool to organize your video clips, illustrations, images, sound files, and more.

For those of you wanting a longer term investment (and have a little more spare change!), keep in mind that there are MSDN subscription programs as well that include some or all of the Expression products:

• Expression Profession Subscription ($999)
  • Expression Studio
  • Visual Studio Standard Edition
  • Windows Vista Business & Ultimate
  • Windows XP Professional
  • Office Standard
  • Visio Professional
  • Project Professional
  • Groove
  • Virtual PC
  • Parallels Desktop for Mac
•  Visual Studio Team System with MSDN Premium ($5469)
  • The Visual Studio Team System 2008 role selected
  • VSTS Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition (5 users)
  • Expression Blend
  • Expression Web
  • Servers
  • Operating Systems
  • Office
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • Toolkits, SDKs and DDK
• Visual Studio Team System Team Suite with MSDN Premium ($10,939)
  • Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
  • VSTS Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition (5 users)
  • Expression Studio
  • Servers
  • Operating Systems
  • Office
  • Microsoft Dynamics
  • Toolkits, SDKs and DDKs