Microsoft Expression and Silverlight. (Conference in San Francisco)

    Today in San Francisco, at the InterContinental Hotel, a Microsoft presentation was held on Silverlight 3 and the Expression 3 product line. I think it’s good to explain what each of these products is. In fact, Silverlight is a plug-in for your browser, cross-platform and cross-browser, as well as supporting most devices. This "flash killer" from Microsoft has great multimedia capabilities, which Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft Product Development Division, spoke about at the presentation. Enumerating the advantages of Silverlight, it is worth noting such as:
    1. Smooth Streaming - a function that allows you to improve the quality of video viewed in a browser, though not in all cases. If you have a good communication channel, then an HD version of the video will be immediately available to you, and if not, then Silverlight will make calculations and after the server and client communicate, depending on the speed of the Internet and the CPU, the desired video viewing quality will be selected on its own, in order to so as not to pry through downloading video. It was this technology that was used to broadcast Michael Jackson’s funeral on NBC, as well as to broadcast the Wimbeldon tennis tournament “live” on the NBC Sports website.
    2. Features for websites, such as the ability to zoom (Deep zoom), which allows you to zoom in and view details in high quality. Used on Hard Rock Cafe sitesand the series Star Gate (Metro Golden Mayer production), as well as on the DeepZoomPix website .
    3. Ability to work off-line. You can install an application on your computer that allows you to plant HD video and many others while offline. As soon as this application is launched, it automatically downloads all the necessary content to its directory. Of course, it is worth noting that this function will be good only to those who have a quick network connection.
    In conclusion, we can say that Microsoft Silverlight 3 is an excellent multimedia platform, which in the future can compete with Adobe Flash Player.
    Now let's move on to the Microsoft Expression family of products. If Silverlight was a product for the user, then Expression products for the developer, it is here that is created, what Silverlight will show. What I liked was the fact that the Expression product line accompanies the developer at all stages of creating something new. This cycle goes from prototype to design and programming. And so let's start from the beginning, create a prototype of the future product, for this we use SketchFlow. Frankly, I liked this particular product of the Microsoft Expression line most of all. The program will allow you to create a working prototype, that is, a working schematic version of your product. As you create, you will not only have a map, for example, a banking interface (in this example, the conference showed the capabilities of SketchFlow), but the visual implementation of this interface, of course, without design refinements, but this is enough to correct errors that may have appeared at the first stages of development, for example, in the convenience of a product or something else, because fixing errors at this stage will cost less and take less time. But the moment always comes when the prototype needs to be shown to the customer. To do this, you need to write documentation, send a prototype file to the customer, make sure that he will have the right software installed ... All this is in the past. SketchFlow will create the documentation itself and export it to MS Word with the click of a button. The customer does not need any additional software to view the prototype, which will already be exported for viewing in a normal browser. And what’s most interesting is the developer feedback method. The customer can simply cross out in the literal sense of the word, an unnecessary element or write something “by hand” directly on the prototype in a browser window. Then send it back to you and all these corrections with a “red paste” will appear in your SkechFlow. With SketchFlow, you can really make quality and convenient prototypes of products and then demonstrate them to the customer. In my opinion, this is actually a good tool that most developers will take for development.
    Now that we have finished the prototype, we transfer it to Expression Blend, in which we have a complete set of tools for creating the design and functionality of our future product. There is support for Photoshop files, 3D and many others. At this stage, we don’t need to redraw the prototype, for example, in Photoshop and create a design there, in Blend we just customize it and add the necessary functionality, because why do the same work twice. It is clear that now I can’t describe the full functionality of the Blend and the demo I saw, which just took place at the conference. I didn’t remember anything extraordinary, perhaps because it wasn’t so far, until the level of Blend’s flash is still far away.
    Another representative of this family is Expression Web. For me, it’s nothing special, support for most of the formats used, scripting (support for twitter in PHP), but the only thing that really liked was the ability to compare how the page looks in different browsers. To do this, the monitor is divided into two parts. In both parts you choose “from what” the page is displayed, you can choose PSD, IE6, IE7, IE8 ... Now it is really easy to compare pages, to fix bugs this is a really good function. I don’t know about you, but for this I’ll install Expression Web.

    While I have nothing more to say about Microsoft Expression, I think it will occupy its niche, especially considering the fact that Microsoft is going to actively promote it to the masses.

    It is also worth mentioning that Microsoft presented pens to all participants in the conference, everything that they wrote on special paper will appear on the computer’s screen, although there is no poppy support, so I couldn’t check :)

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