Microsoft Kills Expression Suite

Microsoft has decided to shut down sales of Expression Suite immediately. Developers who depended on the program need not worry, it will still be available as part of Visual Studio 2012 as an update.

The people it has most annoyed are the few who just bought Expression Studio. Microsoft suggests returning the product for a full refund.

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Good, never understood the separation in the first place.

Oh thank goodness. Never understood why they tried doing any of that in the first place.

Expression was pretty worthless imho, I was kind of excited to try it when I got access to it for free... Then never used it again.

I had to use it at one point to fix a layout issue with a Windows Phone app I was working on. I probably could have written the XAML manually, but I couldn't (with a lot of research) figure out how. It does make working on the interface easier. I managed to do it with the express version so I didn't have to pay anyway.

Why they didn't just integrate the functionality into visual studio to begin with? They claim it was for designers or something but I never understood the point. Maybe it's because I'm not a designer?

This is good, if I get stuck at work (instead of at home) now I'll be able to fire up expression designer because it's going to come with Visual Studio 2012, which we already have.

Rockferd said:

Good, never understood the separation in the first place.

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Yeah, it's about time that VS got some better design tools. Creative professionals weren't buying Expression Suite (besides the encoder, which will continue as a stand-alone product), and it was just another hassle for its primary users: developers.

I always thought it was a low-end competitor to Adobe's Creative Suite and Flash Professional. For Microsoft, it'd be Silverlight.

I got it free before, but could not see myself using it to design and create a website out of it. I always ended up back to Dreamweaver or Notepad++, Photoshop, and Flash.

Damn. I must've been one of the few people that actually liked Expression Studio. Although I mostly used Design and Web, to me Web seemed like the perfect competitor to Adobe's Dreamweaver (both feature and pricewise) - however I'm a coder so I would've been happy with a simple editor that recognised html tags.

Design was great to use, but it always did lack bitmap/raster editing tools, unlike Fireworks which went for more of a middle ground between raster and vector (Design was firmly vector, but I could swear it didn't support the .svg format).

I tried Encoder for recording gameplay footage but it just wasn't able to capture the motion quick enough - but otherwise was fine for desktop recording. Used MSI Afterburner as it provided FRAPS-like quality. Never used it for transcoding.

Neither did I use the Adobe equiv. for Encoder and Blend.