Microsoft Expression Design was

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

's commercial professional illustration

vector Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

and raster graphic design tool for web images based on

Creature House Expression Creature House Expression was an award-winning vector graphics editor developed by Creature House in Hong Kong, founded by Alex S.C. Hsu and Irene H. H. Lee. It was initially marketed through a developer/publisher agreement with Ray Dream Inc. sub ...

, which was acquired by

in 2003. It is available free of charge from Microsoft and is component of the discontinued

Microsoft Expression Studio Microsoft Expression Studio is a discontinued suite of tools for designing and building Web and Windows client applications and rich digital media content. Overview Microsoft introduced Microsoft Expression on September 16, 2005, at Microsoft' ...

suite. Expression Design is more oriented towards editing

XAML Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML ) is a declarative XML-based language that Microsoft developed for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. XAML is used extensively ...

and web graphics rather than print graphics (like

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in ras ...

and

Illustrator An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicat ...

) and does not incorporate all of the raster image editing features of the original

History

Expression Design was codenamed ''Acrylic Graphic Designer'' during Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2005 as part of Microsoft Expression professional tools for

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

, and was originally announced as ''Expression Graphic Designer'' until the current name was adopted in December 2006. The first version of Expression Design was released to manufacturing along with other Expression products on 30 April 2007. The RTM news was announced at Microsoft's

MIX Mix, mixes or mixing may refer to: Persons & places * Mix (surname) ** Tom Mix (1880-1940), American film star * nickname of Mix Diskerud (born Mikkel, 1990), Norwegian-American soccer player * Mix camp, an informal settlement in Namibia * ...

07 conference for web developers and designers. Service Pack 1 for Expression Design was released on October 17, 2007. Expression Design requires the

.NET Framework 3.0 Microsoft started development on the .NET Framework in the late 1990s originally under the name of Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). By late 2001 the first beta versions of .NET 1.0 were released. The first version of .NET Framework was ...

as it uses

Windows Presentation Foundation Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source graphical subsystem (similar to WinForms) originally developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was init ...

. Expression Design is not available as an individual product, but rather only as part of the Expression Studio suite. Originally Expression Studio was not included in any

MSDN Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

subscription, but in 2007 Microsoft added it to the highest level MSDN Subscription. Version 2 was released in May 2008 as part of Expression Studio 2. Expression Design is available for Microsoft Windows XP,

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearl ...

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for download via MSDN and TechNet on August 15, 2012, and later to ...

, and remains compatible with Windows 8.1 and

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...

as of 2019. A trial version of Expression Design is available. A free copy of Expression Studio 4 (as well as older versions) is available as part of Microsoft's

DreamSpark Microsoft Azure Dev Tools for Teaching or simply Azure Dev Tools for Teaching is a Microsoft program to provide students with Microsoft software design, Microsoft developer tools, Cloud Computing Access and learning resources. The program is a ...

campaign to eligible students. Expression Design 4, released as part of Expression Studio 4 added the ability to import Windows Metafile (WMF), Enhanced Metafile (EMF), and Enhanced Metafile Plus (EMF+) files into your Expression Design project. As of December, 2012, Microsoft has announced that Expression Studio will no longer be a stand-alone product. Expression Blend is being integrated into

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such ...

, while Expression Web and Expression Design will now be free products. Technical support is available for customers who purchased Web or Design following their published support lifetime guides, while no support will be offered to free downloaders. No new versions of Expression Web or Design are planned.

References

External links

*
Microsoft Expression team blog
at

MSDN Blogs Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

- News, samples, tutorials for the Suite.
Expression Design blog
at

- focusing on Expression Design.
https://expressiondesign4.com
- Fan site helping to maintain its availability. {{Vector graphics editors D Vector graphics editors Windows-only freeware 2007 software Discontinued Microsoft software

History

See also

References

External links