Examples speak louder than words. At the launch event I attended, a company called electric rain demonstrated their beta product StandOut (www.erain.com/standout). StandOut is a presentation tool that aggressively separates content from visual design, and it was built using Expression Blend and Visual Studio. It has an awesome user experience that takes advantage of the new features in Windows Vista provided by the Windows Presentation Foundation, such as scalable vector graphics. The result is stunning - check out the screenshots (such as http://www.erain.com/products/Standout/img/SS/Pres-Inter01XL.html) to see what a cool tool StandOut is in its own right and to see the rich user interface elements that are going to become the standard as software vendors incorporate Expression Blend into their development processes. It is worth noting that the presentation for the launch event itself was created using StandOut, and it was very impressive.

Another vendor I met at the launch event was Total Training (http://www.totaltraining.com/). They make training for a wide variety of products, and I've been using their Expression Web training to help me get up to speed quickly. It's organized in such a way that you can plow through it sequentially or jump to a specific topic for a quick refresher, making it both a training tool and a reference.

I suspect that Expression Web will be used to create thousands of static web sites, but what excites me is using it as the front end designer for dynamic sites built using ASP.NET and Visual Studio. Visual Studio is an awesome tool, and it's been a staple of development for several years, but it isn't designed for visual designers. Expression Web is. Now there's simply no excuse for having ugly user interfaces on your web software. Even business users deserve a pleasing user experience.

As you can tell, I'm really excited about Expression. I believe it's going to help ISVs significantly enhance the user experience for the applications we use every day, and that's a wonderful thing. Stay tuned as the entire Expression Studio line is released … and usher in the next generation of beautiful and compelling software that blurs the lines between the desktop and the web.

DISCLAIMER: I work at Microsoft, but the opinions expressed here are my own. This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.