Where does MS Expression & Silverlight fit in?

[VB Programmer]

First, let me apologize in advance for my ignorance. But, I have gotten
very tiny glimpses of Expression and Silverlight and am a little confused...

I am an ASP.NET (VB.NET) web developer. I also develop in Flash.

Few *stupid* questions...
1. Where does MS Expression fit in to all of this? Will this eventually
replace VS.NET and Flash? If not, is it complimentary?
2. How about Silverlight?
3. Will you switch over?
4. Do you know if these tools will be available for MSDN Universal
subscribers?



Thanks.

 

[Mark Fitzpatrick]

The design concept behind the Expression studio in general is to give a
better way for designers to develop interfaces that will work well with the
VS.net developers. Some tools, Expression Web for example, are having an
impact on VS in the fact that the EW web designer is being integrated into
Visual Studio 2008 (with some minor functionality missing) to provide for a
better web design experience.

Silverlight is nice, but 1.0 doesn't provide managed interfaces yet.
Silverlight 1.1 will and that will make it even better and easier to work
with.

I don't think it's a matter of switching over, the Expression product suite
doesn't replace VS, it adds more design features than ever before (and also
not all developers are good at working with visual design tools so they may
not need them).

Some of these will be available at MSDN, but I forget which ones (check the
msdn newsgroups for more details). I believe Expression web is, but if not
SharePoint Designer is, and SD is a superset of EW and adds additional
functionality for developing web sites based on SharePoint Server).

 

[VB Programmer]

Very informative Mark.

So, you can create a snazzy design with EW and import it into VS to do the
programming, add data, etc...?

On one of the demos I saw (Blend I think) the person was manipulating the
animation of 3d objects. Do you know if you can model 3d objects with these
tools also?

 

[bruce barker]

expression, blend and silverlight are MS's answer to flash and
dreamweaver. you use blend to build silverlight files, and expresson
design to build vector files for blend to import.

silverlight can call browser javascript for ajax support, or it can host
a .net class (but with heaver startup than javascript - like loading
a java applet).

expect better VS integration than flash (next release of VS has a subset
of expression built-in for web editing), but whether web designers will
switch remains to be seem.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

[VB Programmer]

I guess it's Microsoft's "Flash Killer". Do you know if this supports 3d
modeling?