Expressions Studio 3 was released a about a week ago. I installed it and compared the programs from Expressions Studio 2 and 3 side by side to see what the differences were. I've picked out some of the most notable differences here to describe what's new at a glance. In future post I'll go into deatils about other areas of change.
The first set of differences is visible from within the Programs menu. Most of the programs in Expressions 2 Studio have counterparts in Expressions 3. But there is no Expressions Media 3. New applications included in Studio 3 that were not present in Studio 2 were Expressions Encoder 3 Screen Capture and the Expressions Web 3 SuperPreview. I'll talk about both of those programs in a few moments.
Expressions Web
The first application I started up was Expressions Web 3. The default color scheme of the application has been changed to black and gray and matches the theme of the rest of the Expressions Applications. The first sign of functional changes is visible from the toolbar. Expressions Web 3 has three icons that Expressions Web 2 did not: New Site, Save All, and SuperPreview. The New Site and Save All button is just another way to invoke the same functionality that is already available in the File menu. Regardless of whether you prefer to use the File menu or the icon I encourage frequent use of this functionality. After a power failure occurred while I was working a few days ago I could not help but take note that unlike Visual Studio and the Office applications there is no auto-save functionality.
The SuperPreview functionality can be a productivity enhancer and convenience. Given a web page SuperPreview will allow you to see how the page would be rendered in Internet Explorer 5, 6, 7, or 8. Prior to having this functionality testing the rendering of a web page in different browsers required one to have access to different machines each with a different browser installed. With this functionality you can view either an HTML page stored on your machine or type in an address to a page an you will see a side-by-side rendering of the page using the two rendering engines that you selected. Within one of the view panes you can also quickly switch from one rendering engine to another within the same pane. This is helpful for finding small differences in rendering.
SuperPreview is not a complete replacement for testing pages within other browser. It will only allow one to view a page and scroll through it but not interact in any other way. So this feature could not be used to see how JavaScript code would behave in two different browsers.
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| SuperPreview of a page using IE6 engine and IE8 engine in IE7 Compatibility Mode. Differences in screen layout are clearly visible. |
SuperPreview is not a complete replacement for testing pages within other browser. It will only allow one to view a page and scroll through it but not interact in any other way. So this feature could not be used to see how JavaScript code would behave in two different browsers.
Expressions Encoder
The first difference that stood out about Expressions Encoder is a new utility included with it, the Expressions Encoder Screen Capture Utility. The screen capture utility is a tool for recording screen sessions. The utility allows you to select a region on your screen and then upon pressing the record button it will record activity from that screen region and record audio from your microphone. It can also record video from your web-cam or any other video source connected to your computer. The recordings are saved with the extension XESC and the description "Expressions Encoder Screen Capture File." These files open in Expressions encoder by default.
The expressions Encoder interface is largely unchanged. Support for additional video encoding has been added and you can now produce video that is made to be played offline.
Expressions Design
Not much has changed in Expressions Design 3. Different ways of importing Photoshop files have been added and docking support has been added allowing you to move the interface elements around. When a blur affect is added to an image it is now exportable in WPF or Silverlight compatible affects. Unlike the other Expressions applications you cannot have both Design 2 and Design 3 open at the same time. If one is open and you attempt to start the other it only results in the first receiving focus.
Expressions Blend
Expressions Blend received the largest number of changes of all the applications in Expressions Studio. I'll only touch on a few of the changes. When you start Expressions 3 the splash screen reads "Expressions Blend + SketchFlow." What is SketchFlow? Overall it's a tool that will make communication of a design much easier, allowing you to quickly prototype a design for user feedback. There is a lot I would like to say about SketchFlow but I am going to skip over it for now. The features of SketchFlow are deserving of their own post.
Being a design tool for Silverlight 3 new features were added to Expressions Blend 3 to provide Silverlight 3 support. You will find more properties are available to animate For a Silverlight 3 project you can use Expressions Blend 3 to configure a Silverlight application to run Out of Browser (OOB). For animations that make use of easing there's no a palette of easing shapes.
Prior to the Blend 3 releases I've heard developers express the desire to be able to edit both code and design for a blend project from a single application instead of using Blend and Visual Studio together. Blend 3 now allows you to modify your code from within the Blend interface instead of needing to use Visual Studio for code editing. If you add an event through the properties panel the code behind file for the project will open through a code editor built into Blend. Of course if you want to use Visual Studio for all of your code editing you still have that option. Blend 3 also now has support for Team Foundation Server.
Blend 3 has improved support for managing an element's visual state. A new panel named States shows you the different visual states available for an element. When a visual state is selected elements that you create in the designer are only created within that specific visual state. If you make a change that would affect multiple visual states the designer notifies you. Though a feature called Fluid Layout you can add transitions to changes in the layout of an element. Without this feature of you change a layout attribute such as the grid row in which an element appears the change would be instantaneous. With Fluid Layout the change occurs as a transition.
There are far more changes to Blend 3 than I've mentioned here so I can't discuss all of them while keeping this post reasonably short. In my next post I'll discuss what SketchFlow is and how it can improve your design process.
