Microsoft Expression Session

I attended the Microsoft ExpressionSession in SF today. While I don't consider myself a member of the Microsoft Borg Collective, I am primarily a PC user, and I'm willing to give their new web development suite a fair shake.

The beta of Expression Blend (their Flash competitor) that they showed was still extremely rough. The UI looked overloaded and confusing. The presenters made a big todo about how cool it was that they could use a "search" field to find parameters within the multitude of UI panels... as if this were a good thing. Also, I'm not sure why the application windows all had a non-standard black background (but perhaps it's skinnable).

Expression Web (the Dreamweaver competitor), which was just released, looked a lot better. The UI for the application looked very clean and straightforward. The visual CSS editing was particularly impressive. I'm installing it now, and I'll try to post more detailed comments about it later.

Expression Media, an asset manager, was not demoed, but it sounds like it could be extremely useful. The fact that the Expression assets are output to XML, and tight integration with Visual Studio (expression projects are organized using .sln files), also look like great selling points for this new suite of tools.