Microsoft Kills Expression Suite

[alexforster]

"Kills" isn't a fair characterization.

Blend was the bread and butter of the suite; it was like the "Photoshop" of Adobe's Creative Suite.

Here's the first paragraph of the right-hand column:

  Blend will be fully integrated with Visual Studio 2012.
  Blend for Visual Studio 2012 provides a rich design-centric
  environment for building Windows Store apps and Windows
  Phone apps. In addition, WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow
  support is available today as a preview and will be released
  in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.

Yes, they're killing Design and Web, but those were only [very] poor competitors to Illustrator and Dreamweaver, respectively.

[randomfool]

Blend is effectively dead as well- the people responsible for the 'creative' side of the product were re-org'ed out this summer.

The core of Blend goes into VS, but the vision is going to be traditional WinForms design scenarios from now on out- that's what management is looking for.

[christoph]

Something never quite fit with the Expression suite. I'm very glad I never set aside the time to learn it's arcane ways now. It had huge potential, but always fell somewhat short.

Blend was much like Abobe's Catalyst - both products shared a somewhat similar vision, but were also somewhat, evidently, doomed.

The problem I have at the moment is, for doing quick-fire multi-screen, multimedia apps that can take advantage of modern hardware, there's not much left to use. Adobe Flex still seems to be about the best in terms of structure, performance, productivity and reliability.

The only other system I've found vaguely comparable is Ventuz, but this has a fairly high licensing costs, lack of easily available talent and various other complications.

[xradionut]

I came this || close to buying Expression Studio for a team member last week. :/

The problem is that Microsoft still doesn't communicate it's big vision to developers at large. There's a lot of dead ends and blind alleys that people get led into...

I'm currently commited 80% timewise to the MS stack, but over the last decade alternatives have matured, and attitudes among the folks with the purse strings have changed towards other tech options in the marketplace. It was another weird quirk of timing that I read this news about Expression while installing various Python packages on a Linux box...

[fletchowns]

They do communicate their vision to developers. Remember how they were super committed to Silverlight?

[ct]

Totally concur about lack of communication to devs which is why despite being primarily a MS dev I haven't bothered to jump on the WinRT/Win8 app store empty bandwagon, and have instead been playing with Objective C recently.

For MS to regain status:

1) Fire Ballmer and get someone that understands technology/design to lead a tech company

2) Be more transparent to devs

3) Put more resources to the core tech that differentiates their OS like Apple does with Objective C API, MS should be doing with WPF (not Silverlight or WinRT or another tech - their thought process of supporting JS didn't really gain much JS devs for Win8/WinRT apps, and just ended up burning bridges with long time MS enterprise devs)

Failing the above I see MS losing more devs and as a result less apps supporting the OS and finally less market share.

[fractallyte]

This is dreadful news. 'Expression Suite' was built on Microsoft's acquisition of Creature House in 2003, and their fabulous Expression vector graphics software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression).

At the time, Expression was the closest competitor to Adobe Illustrator: it had unique features ('skeletal strokes', based on the co-founders' PhD research), and a superb UI (yes, imagine a streamlined, friendly interface that was different to Adobe's!). The animation version of Expression, LivingCels, offered similarly innovative animation technology, which was seriously being looked upon as a competitor to Flash. More significantly, though, it was on course to disrupt the (cel-based) animation industry. There's an informational site at: http://livingcels.com

That's why Microsoft bought the company.

So, the little things: Creature House bought back the rights to Expression after MetaCreations went down. (I wish they'd do so now, once more!) The wonderfully whimsical website with beautiful, funny illustrations (by Patrick Lee) was replaced fairly rapidly by Microsoft's soulless corporate rendition. There was a Mac version of Expression - abandoned. Then the Windows version was re-coded to fit into WPF (dropping lots of essential features along the way). LivingCels has vanished.

I still use Expression almost daily. It runs perfectly in WINE (especially important now, since the Mac version isn't Intel-compatible). The user manual is a brilliant example of how manuals should be written, and the sample illustrations demonstrate how painterly effects can be achieved through vector gfx.

There's still nothing quite like Creature House Expression, so it's fortunate that Microsoft are still offering these original versions (Windows & Mac) as free downloads (check the links at the end of the Wikipedia article).

[jarek-foksa]

I would say that Freehand and CorelDraw were the closest competitors to Illustrator back then. I didn't even know about Creature House before Microsoft acquisition.

[stblack]

Microsoft is a bulti-billion dollar company that doesn't much care for developers and users of its products. Oh, it says it cares, and for the incremental cost of an MSDN subscription it can buy the silence and obeisance of influential developers for years.

In the end, it will always suck to be a developer using Microsoft technology.

Here's the Microsoft bandwagon graveyard:

* 3D Movie Maker * Active Documents * ActiveX * COM * COM+ * Courier Tablet * DAO * dbWeb * DDE * Desktop Gadgets * Encarta * Expression and Expression Suite * Frontpage * HailStorm * LINQ to SQL * Live Labs * Live Search Books, Live Search Academic * Microsoft Bob * Microsoft Equipt * Microsoft Kin * Microsoft Live * Microsoft Live One Care * Microsoft Max * Microsoft Passport * Microsoft Repository * Money * MSN Music * OLE * OneCare * OS/2 * Remote Data Objects(RDO) * Response Point * Silverlight * "Smart" Watches * Soapbox * SQL Server DMO * SQL Server DTS * Tablet PC * VB * VBA replaced by VSA * Vine * Vista * Visual Basic * Visual FoxPro * Visual Interdev * Visual JPlus Plus * Visual Source Safe * Web data access via IDC * Windows DNA * Windows for Tablets * Windows Live Spaces * WinFS * Word Basic * WordHelp (.hlp) * XBox Live Service * Zune

Many of these probably deserved to die. But Microsoft's propensity for suddenly marooning thousands of developers and millions of users at a single stroke is unconscionable.

[jmspring]

Silverlight dead? Funny, desktop / laptop machines still require it for Netflix -- not a small audience.

OS/2? Learn your history, MSFT helped create it, but it was an IBM product.

XBox Live? Last I checked it was still around.

I'm not a particularly MSFT oriented person (apple household) but having been around long enough, you might want to expand your horizons around MSFT product life cycles.

And, I very much disagree with your comment of "It will always suck to be a developer using MSFT technologies" ... Assorted MSFT technologies have made developers a lot of money over the years and I don't see that changing much in the next few years. Yes, they lag at mobile, but they are pretty damn big still.

[Delmania]

Your list is not accurate. Vista became Windows 7 & 8, OneCare became Security Essentials, Live is still around, Visual Basic is VB.NET, and I am sure there are more of those technologies. LINQ to SQL is like Silverlight - it's not being actively developed, but you can still use it.

"In the end, it will always suck to be a developer using Microsoft technology."

Just like in free software, it depends on what you learn. The Microsoft technologies I use at work are C#, F#, ASP.NET, and IIS. Those aren't going away anytime soon.

[wbkang]

COM is not even close to being dead. Credibility--

[i386]

3D Movie Maker was a Microsoft Kids product released around 1996. Not a developer product.

[CRASCH]

I wish that was the complete list of EOL products from MS.

[WayneDB]

* ActiveX, COM and COM+ are all still widely used.

* Courier Tablet was never even a product.

* DAO was useful for over a decade and you can still write programs that use it today if you want to. Plenty of people do.

* DDE still works, matter of fact - perusing the list of hot questions on StackOverflow I saw a question about it today.

* Encarta was a developer product?

* Expression/Suite still works and is now available for free! Blend being rolled into Visual Studio? Great!

* Frontpage still works and you can even still buy it new, here you go - http://www.discountmountainsoftware.com/mifrpa.html

* Linq to SQL still works, I just used it in a small project the other day.

* Visual FoxPro made a lot of money for a lot of people and programs built with it still run on Windows 8. I know a company that just paid $50K for a program written in Visual FoxPro. Yeah, I'm sure the original developers hate Microsoft.

* Many of the other products you mentioned were transformed into something else. So, what's the problem? Don't like change?

[sergiotapia]

What happens to all the people who spent years learning how to use it?

It's kind of scary to think you spend learning something in and out only to find out that it's later going to be deprecated entirely. Like Silverlight. Oh well, at least with Silverlight you got something applicable out of it: XAML which works on Windows Phone 8, WPF, etc.

[mutagen]

This is a lesson that repeats itself over and over again in the technology industry and especially with Microsoft's tools. Learn the root technologies themselves, not the tools. Learn HTML and Javascript, not Dreamweaver or Expression. Prefer open source tools over closed. While it often seems that everyone wants a specialist, learn to apply general concepts to specific technologies. Sure, you'll need to know some specifics and be proficient in specific tools but that will come quickly when you know the underlying technologies.

[jared314]

You are describing what Microsoft has done, and is known for doing, for more than a decade. I saw one developer create a list of MS technologies he would ignore because he felt they would disappear. A will-not-learn list.

[silverbax88]

The killing of Silverlight is a particularly accurate example, in that while Silverlight's end point adoption was never really there, the adaptive streaming was so much better than Adobe's that it should have been a home run. But that's definitely not the case; Adobe now owns the market (except Netflix) and anyone trying to work with Microsoft's has to figure things out without anyone at the company who knows how it works.

[Moto7451]

Not sure what to feel about the other products as I never used them (did anyone?) but I'm glad Blend's editor made its way into VS2012. Working with the built in XAML WYSIWIG editor in past versions of VS was always terrible.

People always seemed to be put off by the $300 price tag for the package but I felt it was worth every penny for the keyframe animation mode and just to avoid crashing multiple times per day when accidentally opening a complex XAML file in split mode.

I haven't been on the MS side of things in a few months now but I'll have to go play with VS2012.

Edit: Also wanted to add, for those who actually used Design to do Vector graphics -> XAML conversions, there's an Illustrator plugin available to do that:

http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/

[kenjackson]

Finally! Not having Blend in VS was always odd to me. Merging them makes sense for everyone. I can't say I ever used Design or Web, nor knew anyone that did. I have an odd workflow of Paint.Net and Powerpoint for design (yes, Powerpoint).

[w-ll]

Thinking about it... Powerpoint (presentation software) could be `killer` for mockups. You could go through flows directly. Clicking on things and what-not. Im gonna play with a mix of presentation suits and mock up builders this weekend.

[Daishiman]

At this point, I can't really say I feel bad for their customers, who have already been burnt so many times by Microsoft's abandonment of technologies in pursuit of the next shiny thing.

[ditoa]

Kind of guessed this was going to happen as soon as I saw Blend as part of VS2012. Glad I didn't spend much time with these tools.

[arikrak]

Even though they won't be developing git further, Expression Web and Design are decent programs, so its nice that they'll be free.

[SaltySquid]

Yeah, this sucks... I just bought the Expression Studio several months ago, and now half the stuff in it is free to download. It would've been nice to have known (for sure) what the future held before I bought it.

[encoderer]

http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/productrefund/refund.mspx

If you bought it using a credit (not debit) card then there's also a shot that you have purchase protection benefits that include price protection and compensation for you if a retailer refuses to accept a returned product.

If your card doesn't have those things -- or ESPECIALLY if you're using a Debit card -- this is a good time to learn that debit cards are awful and you should be adding a good go-to credit card.

Any basic Visa Signature card will be a good start, but I'd suggest finding a Signature card that adds in better price protection. Some that come to mind:

* Fidelity 1.5% cashback Amex offered by FIA (aka Bank of America)

* Chase British Airways card -- includes 100,000 bonus miles, very nearly enough to fly first class from SFO to CDG, a $10,000 fare.

* Just about any American Express card -- unless you travel and want the access to airport lounges, the Blue card is often best. Get the variant that best matches your circumstances.

There are many others, but that's a good start. For pure cashback (a little unsure of the Signature benefits):

* Barclays' Priceline-branded card recently changed their rewards. It's a straight 2% cashback card now which is fantastic. And you get a card with Shatner on it.

* NASA federal credit union has a great 2% cashback card, too. It's changed recently and I'm not totally sure of the details but the last I checked it was 2% after you spent a preset amount each year. You can join by becoming a member of, IIRC, the Stargazers society.

Basic, no-benefits credit cards are silly -- get a good one! It's easy! But debit cards are evil. Friends don't let friends use debit cards.

[ayi]

Actually, it was excepted. I can suggest that you should ask on forums (reddit, hn) before deciding on technologies.

[learn]

It would be nice to know the future in most cases.

[edandersen]

It is a great trend of Microsoft to release "free" versions of discontinued software. First Microsoft Money, now Expression Studio. I wonder what their competitors think about it though.

[darrenkopp]

What's happening to super preview? Last time I looked at the expression suite, that looked like a sweet tool.

[rebelidealist]

Sad day.

[camus]

this is so Microsoft... all we need is visual studio to be even more "bloated" ...