We just released Expression Studio 2. The suite includes Expression Web 2, Expression Blend 2, Expression Design 2, Expression Media 2 and Expression Encoder 2 and works seamlessly with both Visual Studio 2005 AND Visual Studio 2008.

The team committed to keep short release cycles and just one year after the first release they are living up to their promises.

This release is very significant for everybody who develops Silverlight 1 sites and applications but also brings great enhancements in other areas (such as PHP and ASP.NET 3.5 and AJAX support in Expression Web).

Also the connection between Expression and Visual Studio has been increased, making it even easier for Designers an Developers to work together.

For those who are not familiar with the suite and the underlying technologies, one of the biggest innovations introduced in .NET 3.0 is XAML, the eXtensible Application Markup Language developed by Microsoft under the Open Specification Promise to enable a more efficient declarative creation of user interfaces.

“XAML is now where we live out that collaboration, which is giving us efficiencies in the design and development process of somewhere in the region of 20 percent to 30 percent” said Paul Dawson, head of experience at Conchango.

I will cover some of the details on XAML in future blog posts, in the meantime find out more about the improvements in the new release in the Expression Suite website.