Customer Reviews

Microsoft Expression Studio [OLD VERSION]

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Microsoft Expression Studio

I am familiar with Visual Studio and .Net, have used it in several languages and different projects. And I also used Frontpage for a while, though I must admit I abandoned it quite a long time ago. So I was reintroduced to Expression Studio by way of being given a copy of Expression Web first Microsoft Expression Web Professional Design Tool. And while I think there is a much steeper learning curve with this product, I am very happy I stepped up to Expression Studio.

First of all, this type of product is going to have a somewhat limited audience. If you just want to create webpages, you should be looking to Expression Web or one of the competing products by Adobe, Macromedia and the like. I can honestly say that Expression Web has enough extras included in it to even create some light apps and easily achieve CSS type functionality.

Now, what if you need to build some front ends for web applications that require more in depth methods and detailed integration of components? Then THIS is the program for you. I am just getting my feet wet with it but they've brought a lot of cool components together here.

In addition to Expression Web, this also includes Blend, Design and Media.
Web - Design web pages and light apps
Blend - Integrate your web pages with web tools and parts
Design - Design graphic pieces easily to use on your pages / apps
Media - Catalog and retrieve your web applets for easy use on different projects

The Design tool is not an Adobe Photoshop level tool, but like all of the Expression Studio pieces it has some time-saving methods included to help you design common elements. Even though I use both Photoshop and Corel for different graphics stuff, this tool is still useful only for the speed of use it provides when it comes to those common picture and button elements.

Of course the Silverlight aspect is still just in its early stages, but so far I have seen a lot of cool stuff made with it. As far as the integration stuff, easier to do basic stuff than Flash. And what's also cool is that you can drill down to the code level and change things very easily. So those who are not hardcore programmers will no longer need to also get Visual Studio to make web apps.

The main con is really the [...] issue. This is about [...] more than the Expression Web product, which is the meatiest of the 4 included tools. There are lots of cool templates included with it. Unless you really want to create completely new templates, you will probably think the Studio product is overkill. Truthfully, many people will get most of what the need with Expression Web. There's no real way to know without trying them out. For me, I wanted to have the full Studio because I saw a cool demo of how to use it and I knew I could save some time with the Blend and Design components.

Like I said, still getting into this but so far I'm glad I did. I loved my Expression Web and now I'm loving this. Hopefully whatever kinks are there will be ironed out in short order.

If you want to try this before you decide on one or the other, you can download an evaluation copy from Microsoft. Just take my advice and work on it for at least 1 or 2 weeks befoe you decide. There's a lot of stuff in here that you should test out.

Enjoy!

It has some nice features if you like to work from code. However, it falls out of activation at the slightest hardware change and there is a bug in the software that makes it extremely hard to re-activate. If you call Microsoft they will charge you $150 to help you re-activate this $100 software. I finally gave up and bought something else.

Disappointed in overall product. The Web portion is improvement over FP (overall) The rest is still lacking. I see updat ($) to stay competative with the Adobe Design Suites which are , unfortunenly, vastly superior. and 2-3 times the price. MS, you let me down with this and Vista

I purchased Microsoft Expression Studio specifically to design a website addressing the essentially total lack of accessibility in essentially all software ( and everything else from products to websites ).

This website in particular addresses accessibility for people with photosensitive and pattern sensitive epilepsy who have seizures triggered by blinking / flashing / scrolling / etc. content.

I purchased Adobe CS3 but I had accessibility problems that Adobe would not even respond to. ( this is after downloading all of the product manuals and looking at them carefully to see if the product was accessible before I purchased it ). So, over $1800 down the drain.

I then purchased MS Expression Studio. I was able to disable some of the more obnoxious features.

Unfortunately, it uses those particularly obnoxious progress bars ( the determinate ones that flash across the screen when you do something non-trivial ). These cause such bad seizures ( complex or simple partial ) that I am totally miserable using the product.

Microsoft is totally incompetent in this area. I have the identical problem with Visual Studio. As software projects evolve in size, I reached a point where these progress bars were appearing regularly and I had to give up on the project about 22,000 lines as I was overwhelmed by the seizures.

From what I am now seeing, I will have the same problem with Microsoft Expression - I will get to a point where the project gets too large and I can no longer maintain it.

You shouldn't use these progress bars unless a significant amount of processing time is required
1) There needs to be a user specified threshhold only after which a progress bar occurs ( I could set it to, say, 1 billion years ). ( One program, Bibleworks, has a similar implementation which makes it accessible )
2) Obviously, you like to know what is going on, if anything. A non-animated hourglass that appears, say, after one second ( this time could be user specified as well ) and a progress bar after, say, 10 seconds
3) A progress bar that only appears after a specified period of time and only updates at specified intervals ( say after 10 seconds and then every 10 seconds )

Microsoft: Accessibility is the LAW.

Try making all your products accessible ( currently none of them are ). Your software makes people sick, it disables them, it destroys their lives ( try Vista for lack of accessibility )

Additionally, there is a bug in the software that prevents ANY products from being unlocked ( it will not accept the product key for the rest of the studio )

So $500 down the drain. The rick get rich and the disabled get looted.

Accessibility is the law. It was until the Republicans came along ...