Microsoft News Tracker

Overshadowed by the Microsoft Yahoo takeover soap opera last week, Microsoft released version 2 of its Expression Studio collection of Web tools:

• Expression Web 2 for Web design
• Expression Blend 2 for multimedia and 3-D design
• Expression Design 2 for graphic design
• Expression Media 2 for managing multimedia assets
• Expression Encoder 2 for video encoding

Expression Encoder is new in version 2 of the Studio and among other new features, Silverlight support was added to all of the tools, and PHP and ASP.NET 3.5 support was added to Expression Web. The PHP support reflects broader aspirations than just covering the needs of captive Microsoft technology developers but it will be difficult to break the grip that Adobe Dreamweaver has on that market.

Less desirable is the perpetuation of the wacky dichotomy between Microsoft developer tools (Visual Studio) and design tools (Expression). Developers who subscribe to the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) have been promised only a subset of the Expression tools and they will have to either ante up for a standalone copy or buy an Express Professional Subscription (which partially overlaps the MSDN subscription) to get the full set.