Welcome / Related Development Products
Subtitles of the Movie
Now there are some related development products that you need to be aware of when you're working with Visual Studio 2008, and these are called your Expression Tools. Now, here's the deal, and we'll talk about this more in a different video. But, one of the problems that Microsoft has recognized is that for those of you who are the developer nerds, OK, and I use nerds in the most complimentary of ways, OK? I'm one of you. But, people who tend to develop and write the logic for applications, no offense here, but generally aren't the most artistic design-oriented type people on the planet, if you know what I mean. So, a lot of times those two skills are in two separate bodies. Somebody has that artist whatever it is that allows them to build really cool Interfaces that are fluid and they look very appealing, and they're very easy to use, and they're intuitive, and they're user-friendly, and all those catch words that we use, but our developers, man, we know how to bang out code that connects to databases and does all kinds of cool stuff, and we separate it in tiers and we gripe and complain about XML and then we make it work, and all that stuff, so, what Microsoft's done in these last two versions, 3.0 and 3.5, of the Framework is they've introduced things like WPF, the Windows Presentation Foundation. Now what that does is it allows the developer and the designer to each separately work on a particular form or a web page or whatever, and then mail these together, and what's happening is, is in the background the design's being built using XAML tools and so forth, so this is what those are. So when we talk about related products and Expression Tools we're talking about those designer type tools. And notice the first one up's called Expression Blend, and this is where somebody can create these Windows Presentation Foundation Interfaces based on XAML, that's called Zamil, is the way that's pronounced, and you can also use the same tool to create Silverlight Apps. Now, Silverlight, the folks at Microsoft would beat me up for saying this, but think Flash, OK, but Silverlight is that end-browser, more video looking functionality. You can do some really cool stuff with it. If you just go to microsoft.com it'll probably pop up and ask if you want to install Silverlight, but anyway you can go do a search on Silverlight and look and see what it is and see what it does for you. The next tool is Expression Design and this creates Vector-based illustrations. It's a drawing tool, basically but you can create vector-based illustrations that do all kinds of cool stuff including text and a whole lot of other things. Expression Web is basically Expression for the web tools, for ASP.NET Web Forms, Web Sites, it lets you basically put the Windows Presentation Foundation coolness factor into your web pages. The next one is Expression Encoder. Now what this Encoder does is it encodes audio and video and then you can use this to publish it out to your Silverlight Apps, so this is kind of the compression and coding whatever, for audio and video that you're going to include on your website. Expression Media is a tool that you use to basically collect all of your design files into visual catalogs, and if you're ever done any kind of design work it's really hard to name the file bit in a way that reflects the nuances, you know, a darker background, or a more Freeform, or a more abstract look. So anyway, this lets you put all your files into Visual Catalog, it's kind of like thumbnails, so you can see what's going on. And then there's Expression Studio that you can buy that puts all of these tools into one package. Obviously it's going to cost you a little more, right? But what this is going to do for you is let you, again, design separately from the guys who are developing, and so you're going to see references to these tools all over the documentation and out there in the real world. Now we're not going to touch on Expression in this Course because it's kind of outside this Course. We're more about using Visual Studio 2008 to develop, and so this is, if you're a developer, if you're an artsy type person, if you like to do graphics and so forth, then go take a look at the Expression Tools, and again, go to microsoft.com and just do a search on Expression and you'll see some really cool stuff. They have some great examples and galleries out there.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Introduction to Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 |
| Author: | Mark Long |
| SKU: | 34008 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-54-8 |
| Release Date: | 2009-06-26 |
| Duration: | 7 hrs / 72 lessons |
| Captions: | Available on CD and Online University |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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