Motivation: First Looks at Microsoft's Expression Suite
Features: The Expression Suite provides a development base for WinFX=Avalon/Vista

On September 14th at the PDC-Professional Development Conference Microsoft announced its Expression Suite of tools. Now many pundits called this the opening salvo on Adobe/Macromedia. And judging by the description of the tools just below, they might be justified. But Expression Suite is really designed for bigger game - its designed to keep Microsoft's Longhorn/Vista on par with Appletel.

The problem for Vista is that in order to make its 2006 delivery deadline, Microsoft has had to cutback on WinFX-Avalon windowing, gut the WinFS-Yukon databased file system and also reduce WinFC-Indigo. Having drastically taken away what was to be a superior function and feature upgrade in the original Longhorn, Redmond is now adding back features to fend off Appletel and make Vista a more compelling upgrade given that it appears to have yet again larger hardware resource requirements. One of the compelling "addbacks" is appearing through the Expression Suite.

The Expression Suite

Some will argue that there really is no addback, that Avalon which becomes WinPF-Windows Presentation Foundation is just evolving in a natural way. The XAML-eXtensible Application Markup Language needs a sophisticated Designer system to render not just the GUI but some of the multi-media and 3D features in WinPF. So Expression Suite is WinPF's XAML based design tools and is comprised of:
Acrylic becomes Expression Designer and is a vector and bitmap designer; see our first look
Sparkle becomes Interactive Designer and is 2D/3D animation creation tool - top box;
Quartz became Web Designer and is a web development tool - bottom box.
In the diagram Expression's graphic files feed into both Interactive Designer and Web Designer. In turn Interactive Designer and Web Designer Projects feed directly into Visual Studio 2005 where they can be used to help develop applications for Web and/or Windows as XAML based applications which can be run in Windows Vista or Windows XP - but not Windows 2000, NT, ME, 98 nor 95. Also its not clear at this time if those Sparkle and Quartz projects that have been modified in Visual Studio - can they be re-imported back into Sparkle and Quartz for further post-Visual Studio refinements ?

This is definitely a first look because the information on the tools is still quite sketchy - goto the following Expression Suite Home for the latest information. But clearly the purpose of the Expression Suite is to provide the graphics development backbone direct from Microsoft for Windows Vista and its Avalon/WinFX/Windows Presentation Foundation system. Microsoft is not waiting for or relying on the traditional graphics heavyweights like Adobe, Corel, Macromedia (soon to be a part of Adobe) and Ulead to bring their tools to the Windows Vista environ; but rather are leading with fairly innovative tools in the 2D bitmap/vector, 2D & 3D animation and Web development spaces. Lets look at each member of the Expression Suite in a bit more detail.

Acrylic or Expression Designer


Now each of the Designers has a distinct and clearly defined role in the Suite. For example, Expression Designer allows designers to create bitmap drawings and/or vector illustrations for use in Web or other applications. Expression Designer, though copying many of the commands of Adobe Photoshop, is really much closer to Macromedia Fireworks or Xara X1 which also straddle the bitmap and vector design worlds. Expression Designer clearly is not in the same league in functionality and polish as Adobe Photoshop or even Corel PhotoPaint and PaintShop Pro or Ulead's Photo Impact.

But Expression Designer clearly lifts Microsoft out of the home consumer world of Picture It paint software and enables users to develop bitmap images in BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF format. In addition it also allows creation of combined bitmap and vector illustrations which can be saved in Adobe PSD, PDF, EPS and AI formats as well as Microsoft's new .XAML format for use with WinPF/Avalon GUIs. Notably absent from these image file formats are AutoCAD DWG, Corel CDX, JPEG2000 and SVG. Also, curiously , Acrylic cannot read back the .XAML files it wrote out.

Again we have done a more comprehensive review of the 2nd beta of Acrylic here based on a August technology drop. Here is what has changed since that review. Expression Designer continues to build on its 3rd party Creature House Expression roots. For example the range of Live Effects , similar to Fireworks Filters and Photoshop's Styles, has been broadened which means more filters can be applied non-destructively, toggled off and on and customized by designers. Variations and Effectline commands allow either shapes or strokes to be drawn with randomized changing attributes within user specified parameters. These tools are great for creating novel backgrounds and textures. There are a number of small improvements in brush stroke definition, gradient controls, and applying textures, Finally along with Live Effects, Expression has Styles which are destructive but do allow for control of a number of preset combined color, paint properties and effects.

Illustrators, already benefiting from the brush creation tools will appreciate a broader array of pressure and gesture sensitive stylus and tablet/pucks. As well the whole Expression canvas can be rotated to make applying certain directional brush strokes easier to do. But clearly Acrylic shows "come from way behind". So many of the dialogs and tools simply do not have the richness of even their intermediate competitors. For example, choose a vector Pen tool in Acrylic and Corel PaintShop Pro - and PaintShop Pro's option bar has many more options and controls. If you choose any of the bitmap Image Filters - Acrylic looks crude in comparison. Also after slavishly following a lot of Photoshop's menu commands, Acrylic uses a layout and weird set of icons and controls in its toolboxes which just adds to the program's learning curve. Bottom line - though applying some innovative integration of bitmap and vector functions, Expression Designer is entering a market that has featured relentless and outstanding innovation. Bottom line, it appears that Acrylic needs at least another year or more of polishing.

Sparkle - Interactive Designer

Sparkle has had the most buzz about it and generally has been touted to be a Flash killer. But to kill Flash, Microsoft has to do a lot. First, it has to match the Flash Player which in the recent 8.0 go around added some very compelling features. And there will be an 8.5 version fast on Player 8's heels which further revs the market leading multimedia container.

Consider there are approximately 500 million active Flash users. And that number will grow both on the PC and especially in embeddeds. The Flash Player itself has distinct size, install, modes of use and cross platform advantages over an untried Sparkle system.The Flash .SWF container has distinct advantages over Redmond .XAML+others in file size, cross platform spread, and range of media accepted.

Second, Microsoft will have to contend with a Flash that has finally and intelligently been broken into two parts. There is the data processing/developer version of Flash under Flex which has Flash GUI data processing features that are quite well polished and will see even further improvements when the Zorn (Eclipse based) version of Flex comes out. Right now Flex more than matches Sparkle for ease of data processing development. MXML has features that Microsoft's XAML will eventually copy. And of course Flex has greater cross platform reach.

Wish I could say the same for Flash on the designer side of the fence where Sparkle has some distinct advantages. Sparkle supports some novel timeline innovations such as distinct Timelines for different events and states plus Adobe After Effects like property animations plus the ability to bind properties to external data sources or other properties. Most important, Sparkle adds a broad range of 3D figure manipulations something that Flash has left for 3rd party tools like eRain's Swift 3D, Autodesk VIZ, MindAvenue's Axel and many others. And this is 3D that is hardware accelerated through WPF-Windows Presentation Foundation's link to special graphics cards. This 3D combined with custom styles and layouts puts Sparkle a distinct notch in the design world ahead of Flash. But Flash's symbols and components have features that Sparkle is pressed to match.

As noted above Sparkle can pass projects to Visual Studio where developers then can add serious programmability features. How easy it is to round trip is back and forth between Visual Studio and Sparkle is an open question. Given that Acrylic cannot do round tripping yet I am from Missouri on Sparkle's ability to do XAML and VS Project round tripping. But I certainly am impressed with the direction Sparkle is headed in with integration with Visual Studio.

Finally, there are 3 big caveats associated with Sparkle. First, there is still not available a CTP - Community Technology Preview of Sparkle/Interactive Designer. So all our observations are from demos, briefings, printed/blogged first looks and other reactions. Very dangerous source material for comparisons. Acrylic has proved to lack the polish and nuance of a wide range of competitive products, what is to say Sparkle will do better ? Second, this is first generation code from Microsoft - I know, eyes roll about reliability and security. Finally, what Macromedia has learned over a long period with Flash is that success is measured not just in design and development but also delivery and performance. And on cross platform delivery - Flash is 500 million users ahead of Sparkle. On compression and ease of delivery ... well what Microsoft can do to match the very efficient and finely tuned .swf files and Flash Player is yet to be even glimpsed. And if Forester and Gartner are right, Adobemedia will likely be ahead until 2008-2009 when Vista finally gets adopted in large numbers and carries Sparkle along.

But I have my doubts about even Sparkle will achieve even parity with Flash - Sparkle and XAML require enormous computing resources - 64MB graphics cards, 1GB in memory super Pentium machines. Already, the market is starting to split between sub-$500 machines and specialized $2000 laptops and workstations. I don't think businesses, minding their IT bucks closer than ever before, are going to upgrade to 100% workstations - in fact I think the 80-20 rule is going to break against Microsoft.

All this said, Sparkle/Interactive Designer is a bold product. It appears to put (we will remove the mealy words "appears to" when a beta of Sparkle is made available) Microsoft ahead of Flash in design, roughly on par in terms of development, and still way behind in delivery of rich media experiences. Given the fairly long time it will take Vista to win Sparkle delivery presence in the marketplace, Microsoft will need another plan for getting Sparkle acceptance in the broad web design market. See our story here on how Microsoft hopes to achieve that.

Quartz Web Designer


Our impressions of Quartz are somewhat like Sparkle - there have been demos and briefings but still no hands on beta code to work with. However, this is the one tool in the Expression Suite that has the least amount of demos and briefings available to developers. Yet it also has one of the more audacious claims coming from Microsoft on standards based Web design, in their own words:
Quartz allows users to "create accessible, standards-conformant Web sites by default or configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML, XHTML, and CSS standards as well as browser schemas. Use built-in compatibility and accessibility checkers to ensure your sites will render in any browser."

Now this will be a major breakthrough if Microsoft does deliver true Web standards enforcing software. Of course, some would argue that Microsoft should have no need for implementing such standards enforcing checkers if their own IE browser and Visual Studio JScript and other Web development tools played by the standards. But IE has yet to deliver on Microsoft's promises to conform to W3C standards in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM and now even in XML.

We have 3 important concerns about Microsoft enforcing standards:
1)Sins of omission-Microsoft will choose what standards to enforce and may very well use the opportunity to bury standards that they oppose and/or refuse to support. Look for whether Microsoft supports XFORMS, SVG, CSS 2.1 and CSS 3, DOM rationalization, JavaScript's E4X, JPEG2000, XHTML 1.1, WML 1.3 and 2.0, XSLFO, and XSLT. In general look very carefully at the details on standards support in Quartz.
2)Microsoft says "in any browser" . But what does that mean ? Again Redmond could conveniently mean Windows only browsers with no Safari for Mac or Konqueror for Linux. As well Microsoft is infamous for rosy announcements on standards and then slowly just not delivering.
3)Sins of commission-Microsoft will claim their own software as creating de facto standards.Will JScript extensions, XAML, and ASP among others be treated as standards ?
Now some readers may regard this as being too tough on Microsoft - as soon as Redmond makes a gesture towards supporting standards, reviewers look at the gift horse in the mouth and declare it bogus.

We are not doing that. Instead, the recommendation is for developers to be appropriately cautious. Why do we say "appropriately cautious". Internet Explorer and Java. Since 2000 Microsoft has not only failed to meet its commitments to deliver HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript standards compliance but also has stopped all development on IE. This conveniently includes stonewalling a whole array of standards such as XFORMS, XML Namespaces, SVG, JavaScript 2.0 and E4X, JPEG2000, DOM rationalization, CSS 2.1 and 3.0, etc. In the case of Java, despite "reconciliation" with Sun, Microsoft still distributes an obsolete version of the JVM-Java Virtual Machine runtime engine and Visual J++ and J#, deviant forms of Java - deliberately polluting the Java development space on Windows. These are but two reasons for developers being "appropriately cautious" about Geeks bearing gifts .... uhhhh Microsoft supporting standards.

Now from a technical viewpoint Quartz is an impressive tool. Microsoft emulates the strength of Dreamweaver, the ability to do HTML+CSS layouts with drag and drop ease plus mutually updated visual or code views. What remains to be seen is whether Quartz supports the battery of scripting frameworks that Dreamweaver does: ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Perl, JSP, etc. But Quartz like Sparkle has project integration with Visual Studio that Dreamweaver has no match for. Curiously, like Dreamweaver, Quartz appears to have no AJAX features with the Atlas Framework going standalone or part of Visual Studio. So again there is a caution - without a beta, there is no way yet to tell how robust the round tripping from Quartz to Visual Studio and back will be.

Summary

Some analysts say be careful about giving Microsoft's Expression Suite too much demo-based credit. This review has tried to be circumspect - and not announce where there simply is not enough practical evidence to declare features winning or not. Also we have cautioned developers about Microsoft's standards promises and compliance - your best bet is to be from Missouri - show me. But with Expression Suite, Microsoft has done 4 things:
1)showed that they will have sophisticated homebrew graphics software closely integrated with their Visual Studio development tool for their new XAML-based Windows Presentation Foundation;
2)issued real technical challenges in the Photoshop/Illustrator, Dreamweaver/GoLive and Flash market spaces;
3)guaranteed that interest in RIA-Rich Internet Application technologies like Ajax, Flash/Flex, Java J2ME or J2SE, and their own WinPF/XAML will move up a notch or two;
4)served notice that Microsoft will be battling Appletel with a Full Suite of Graphics armor.
Not a bad showing for Eric Rudder and his Expression Suite development teams.