Microsoft Expression Community Blog

Expression Discussion Forums: Answered? Helpful? Mark it so!

LoriDirks — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:42:34 GMT

Maybe it's your first time to the Expression Forums, or maybe you hang out there a lot answering questions and helping the new folks out. Either way, there's a quick and easy way you can help others quickly find the most relevant info, and give well-deserved props to the people providing the most help.

Did someone take the time to provide a thoughtful answer to your question? Mark as Answer.

Do you see a question that was answered but not marked? Propose it as Answer.

Did someone offer a helpful bit of advice or a tip that you found useful? Mark as Helpful.

How?

Look, up there, to the right. In the header of every reply to a thread you have options. Sign in and you'll see more options.

Mark as Answer

If you posed the question (or if you're a moderator) you can mark the answers to your question. Just click Mark as Answer in the upper right.

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Propose as Answer

See an answer that hasn't been marked, but it isn't your question? Propose a post as the answer, by clicking Propose as Answer in the upper right.

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Post was Helpful

See a useful bit of info, a hint, a tip, or just all-around good advice? Reward the poster with a Helpful vote. Just click Post was Helpful in the upper right.

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Direct Links to Expression Forums

Expression Studio Forum

Expression Blend Forum

Expression Web Forum

Expression Encoder Forum

Expression Design Forum

Expression Media Forum

Expression Community Site Feedback Forum

Happy Holidays from the Microsoft Online Store -- 50% Savings on select expression products

LoriDirks — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:25:29 GMT

We're snowbound in the chilly Pacific Northwest; very unusual. Microsoft's Redmond campus is open, but running with limited services. Folks are playing hooky, sledding, making snow creatures, and trekking to the store on foot for essentials.

In fact, it looks like much of the US is in the grip of winter storms, from coast-to-coast.

What better time to offer a cheery holiday deal on Expression products from the Microsoft Online Store?

For a limited time, US customers can shop online for Microsoft Expression Web, Expression Blend, and Expression Studio and get 50% off.

Expression Web Upgrade $49.95
Create modern, standards-based web sites and applications using CSS + XHTML, ASP.NET, PHP
Expression Blend Upgrade $49.95
Create rich interactive and web applications for WPF and Silverlight
Expression Studio Upgrade $174.95
Get Expression Web, Expression Blend, Expression Media, Expression Encoder, and Expression Design in one package

Chances are good that you qualify for the Upgrade pricing if you have any existing web design or creative software.

[Note: Pricing and specials are set on a locale-by-locale basis. This deal applies only to US customers of the Microsoft Online Store and is valid only for a limited time.]

Upgrade Pricing Eligibility

Here's the clarification I got on upgrade pricing eligibility for this offer:

Upgrade pricing eligibility for Expression Blend and Expression Studio, for this limited time offer, includes owners of:

Licensed copy of any version of any Expression Product

OR

Adobe Creative Suite - any version
Adobe/Macromedia Flash or Director - any version
Visual Studio® Standard & Professional – any version
CorelDraw X3, X4

Upgrade pricing eligibility for Expression Web includes owners of:

Licensed copy of an earlier version of Expression Web

OR

Adobe Creative Suite - any version
Adobe/Macromedia Flash or Director - any version
Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver - any version
Adobe GoLive - any version
Microsoft Office - any version
Microsoft FrontPage® - any version
Quark QuarkXPress - any version

Expression Website: New Home page

LoriDirks — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:46:35 GMT

We launched a new home page on the Expression Community website last Friday. (Hooray!)

The new design was guided by a desire to offer deeper, more relevant content, as well as easier access to some of our most important learning resources.

How Do I...? Videos

These snack-sized, coffee break length videos offer concrete task-based information that you can immediately put to use in the real world. (If they don't, you can let us know using the ratings and comments--we pay close attention to every one and share them with the video presenters.) Most videos will be in the 3 - 5 minute range, with a few stretching to 10 - 15 minutes.

Look for new videos in this section 1 - 3 times a week. Our training team has made a strong commitment to producing lots of tutorials and training videos in this format over the next several months.

Inside Expression

Microsoft can seem like a faceless, mega-beast corporate entity. [Insert your "evil empire" joke of choice.] The fact is, our teams are made up of real people who have a genuine passion for crafting great design software that helps you create great web experiences. You'll get to meet some of those folks here.

Features and Articles

We want to bring you some of the deeper stories behind what we're doing and why Microsoft is making such a big investment in user experience design and development. You'll see a variety of articles here featuring conversations with community members, diving into specific design/development projects and achievements, surveying industry best-practices, and discussing the concepts that guide our work.

This week you'll see an interview spotlighting the work of community member Carl Camera, an article about the Deep Zoom Composer, and an interview the User Interface Resource Center conducted with Karsten Januszewski one of our technical evangelists about building user experiences.

You can have Features and Articles delivered directly to your feed reader, just click on the orange RSS icon next to the title.

Have an idea for an article or something you'd like to contribute? Just let me know, you can email me at lori(dot)dirks(at)microsot(dot)com--usual email decoding applies--or you can post in the comments here.

What's Fresh

Not everything we add to the site can make it onto the home page. What's Fresh is where you can look to find the deeper content we've added. This is powered by a raw feed, everything that happens on the site is reflected here, including updates to existing pages.

You can have What's Fresh delivered directly to your feed reader, just click on the orange RSS icon next to the title.

Tips

Okay, we slipped this in a few weeks ago but I'd be remiss not to point it out. We're publishing 3 new product-related tips every week. Tips cover a variety of topics, pointing out features you might not know about, as well as offering step-by-step instructions for accomplishing everyday tasks.

You can also have Tips delivered directly to your feed reader--just click on the orange RSS icon next to the title.

Team Effort

As with all things site-related, the home page updates were the result of serious team effort. The final design resulted from a collaboration between Steve, the Principal Product Unit Manager (aka: guy in charge) for the Expression Web product; Patrick, our platform Site Manager (aka: guy in charge of implementation and delivery and deployment); Kirupa, a Program Manager for Expression Blend (and all-around go-to guy); Eric, another of our platform Site Managers; Kerby, our platform Senior Site Manager; and me. We also relied on insights and feedback provided by not one, but two groups of super-savvy high school and college interns working across a variety of teams at Microsoft this summer.

Be Part of the Website Team--Tell Us How We're Doing

Our focus is on creating a site that offers you what you're looking for and provides the best possible experience. You can help us out with that by contributing your ideas and offering your feedback. What would you like to see? How can we improve things? What can we do more of? What's just right. Just let me know, you can email me at lori(dot)dirks(at)microsot(dot)com--usual email decoding applies--or you can post in the comments here.

Geeks at Heart: Expression community And Hyper-V

LoriDirks — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:15:02 GMT

Looks like the big news is out: Microsoft shipped Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V ahead of schedule.

We're not too surprised over here at the Expression Community web site. Our server pool moved to Hyper-V on May 21st and we've been pleased. Our "big sister / big brother" platforms--MSDN and TechNet--tested the virtualization technology in production starting in March and April. The performance, stability, and scalability gains led to a decision to accelerate adoption.

The team reported:

Hyper-V has been exceptionally stable, proving capable of delivering the end-to-end availability of MSDN and TechNet compared to the previous physical platform during both beta and RC0 usage. In fact, for the deployment so far, MSCOM Ops has not encountered a single production-impacting bug. This is definitely quite an accomplishment for the Hyper-V development team.

That's pretty high praise for beta bits aka "dog food".

Congrats to the Hyper-V team!

Expression Community site Feedback Forum Live Now

LoriDirks — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:49:12 GMT

We want to hear your suggestions to make the Expression Community site better. What kind of features are you looking for that you don't see? What are we doing now that we could do better?

We are actively engaged in making changes to the site to accommodate new content and features. We're in talks with the development teams to define the next-gen site functionality. This is a great time for you to tell us what you want the community site to be.

Let us know what you're thinking in the Site Feedback forum, and tell us what you think of the suggestions other folks have posted.

Crashing the Party: Firefox 3 and Silverlight 2

LoriDirks — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:10:14 GMT

If you're using Firefox 3 to visit our site, there's a good chance you've encountered some odd behavior. Some people are reporting browser crashes, others are seeing requests to install Silverlight despite it being installed already. Simply put, the two are not playing nice together.

Tim Heuer posted an informative summary of the issue on his blog, with links to all the nitty gritty details. If you're a geek at heart you might want to read the (long) discussion in Bugzilla, it reminds me a little of the kids game hot potato.

What's the upshot of this? Well, Silverlight released a workaround and we expect to deploy it to our servers next week. The pain should be short-lived, the odd behavior should stop.

All of the individuals who work on Expression products are committed to standards-based, cross-browser user experiences on the web. Really. That's not market-speak. Every person I've spoken with on the team is passionate about it. It's one of the big reasons I decided to join Microsoft 3 months ago.

As a hub for the community of Expression users, our site is committed to these principles, too. We'll be back to Firefox-friendly as soon as possible. I'm personally running both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3, and I'll keep an eye on how it's going.

I have to admit it, I have an abiding fondness for Firefox. Before coming to Microsoft I was a designer and front-end web dev at Amazon. While there, my team (all two of us) created the first CSS-based table-free page framework. During that time I relied heavily on Chris Pederick's Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox--usually to figure out where my CSS went astray or to test a bug fix. When IE7 was released with a Developer toolbar I was thrilled that my toolbox had gotten bigger.

I bounce back and forth between toolbars and browsers now, depending on what I need to do. And there's never a time I don't have both browsers open on my laptop--usually multiple instances of both.

So, if you're a multi-browser user too--and what designer or developer for the web isn't?-- you can be assured that we're working on the problem and we expect to have it resolved soon.

If you're developing Silverlight apps and running them on a site, you'll need to update your servers with the latest Silverlight.js file too; it's included in the Silverlight 2 SDK. See the fourth paragraph in Tim Heuer's blog post on the subject for more info.

Expression Community: Terms of Engagement

LoriDirks — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:27:00 GMT

I think it's important for every community to have an agreed-upon (or at least explicitly-stated) set of ground rules for how individuals will behave with one another, just like any relationship--personal and business.

Key terms of enagement for me include mutual respect, honesty, and compassion.

I find Channel 9's Code of Conduct both insipiring and comprehensive:

Channel 9 is all about the conversation. Channel 9 should inspire Microsoft and our customers to talk in an honest and human voice. Channel 9 is not a marketing tool, not a PR tool, not a lead generation tool.
Be a human being. Channel 9 is a place for us to be ourselves, to share who we are, and for us to learn who our customers are.
Learn by listening. When our customers speak, learn from them. Don't get defensive, don't argue for the sake of argument. Listen and take what benefits you to heart.
Be smart. Think before you speak, there are some conversations which have no benefit other than to reinforce stereotypes or create negative situations.
Marketing has no place on Channel 9. When we spend money on Channel 9 the goal is to surprise and delight, not to promote or preach.
Don't shock the system. Lasting change only happens in baby steps.
Know when to turn the mic off. There are some topics which will only result in problems when you discuss them. This has nothing to do with censorship, but with working within the reality of the system that exists in our world today. You will not change anything by taking on legal or financial issues, you will only shock the system, spook the passengers, and create a negative situation.
Don't be a jerk. Nobody likes mean people.
Commit to the conversation. Don't stop listening just because you are busy. Don't stop participating because you don't agree with someone. Relationships are not built in a day, be in it for the long haul and we will all reap the benefits as an industry.

I'm ready to commit to an open conversation based on mutual respect. I hope you will too.

What Does Community Mean to You?

LoriDirks — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

In my last post, I shared a few of my thoughts on community. I'd like to ask what community means to you in the context of the Expression Community and our website.

Here are a few questions I'd like to get your thoughts on. Your anwsers will help us as we shape the website. Please reply in the comments below so all of us can participate in and benefit from the conversation. If you have sensitive comments to make or prefer to give input privately, you can email me directly using the email link at the top left of the page.

What does Community mean to you when you think of the Expression Community website?
What do you need / want most from the community?
When you come to the website, what's the most important thing you want to see? What are you looking for?
How do you like to participate in an online community? Active contributor, lurker, somewhere between the two?
What are we doing well and what could we do better?

Keep your eyes out for a Website Feedback forum on the site soon. I'll blog about it when it's launched.

Why Community? Because We are Smarter than Me.

LoriDirks — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:20:00 GMT

Ever since I saw the phrase "we are smarter than me" on the Social Computing and Bloggers at Microsoft discussion lists a couple of weeks ago, it's been knocking around in my head. I haven't read the book by the same title yet (I just ordered it from Amazon and I'll get it Tuesday), but it's a brilliant bit of truth.

The Expression Studio teams launched the Expression Community website this year to provide a forum for sharing tips and info, as well as suggestions and questions. My vision for the Expression Community website is to build a hub for conversations among team members, community members, and anyone interested. Lots of people are already participating, check out the forums and gallery, then join in.

Value flows to and from a community based on each of us sharing our varied experiences and bits of knowledge. Taken as a whole, we all know more than any individual and everytime we offer up an opinion, an answer, our creative inspiration, we're enriching the community and broadening the base of information and collective wisdom. With every offering, our We is getting stronger and smarter.

I'm looking forward to watching us grow, and I look forward to hearing from you.