Microsoft invades The Beach

Microsoft's presence in Brighton is pretty impressive. They are far more visible than Adobe and they are here to show off the designer tools announced yesterday and grab developers from the pool of Flash developers and designers present.

by Jens C. Brynildsen Just weeks ago, I wrote an article about how there will be a war over developers for the next years. Adobe officials speak at the conference and tonight there is a Flash birthday party sponsored by Adobe, but Microsoft has an even bigger presence. They have a big stand doing live product demos all day, four workstations where you can play with the software yourself, free (boxed) software, free beer on the first day ending, plus 8 Xbox 360 machine loaded with the newest games. Adobe has some great products, but Microsoft has the largest amount of developers and Microsoft is currently the only one of these two actively recruiting developers to their tools. Adobe is just sitting on the fence watching and putting out failed marketing for Flex. Enough about that - on to Microsoft's presentation.

Jon Harris from Microsoft (former Macromedia employee) started by giving a quick overview of Expression Web, a product clearly targeting the Dreamweaver segment. The Expression Web software is free to all participants on the conference, so they really want people to reconsider. This really reminds me of the early days of Flash where Adobe and Macromedia would give out their software for free at the first FlashForward conference.

Yesterday was the launch of Microsoft's big designer-push, with the announcement of the tools lineup and a brand new design sub-site to Microsoft.com

Expression Blend
The main product for designers and web programmers is Blend. Blend is actually built with Blend based on the Windows presentation Foundation (WPF). Jon started his demo by drawing some squares on top of each other. He then added a timeline (you can add multiple), rotated one of the squares, exported the file and then restarted Blend since it crashed silently (it's still beta). Once restarted, the rotating square pushed the other squares below it automatically, so even for graphics, there is some kind of layout engine in Blend. Blend has a timeline, but has no standard concept of a keyframe, start or stop. This is not quite true as they DO indeed use something similar, but they call it something else. Anyway, the end result looked good and the tool automatically added events to play the timeline much in the way Dreamweaver adds behaviors to it's DHTML timeline.

Another example highlighted this again where he used a 3D object, added three camera positions around the 3D object and then made three squares to use as buttons. When he added the events for these, the process was just like adding behaviors to image buttons in Dreamweaver. Interesting to see this similarity.

In another example, he imported a flat image, converted it to 3D and could instantly do a 3D rotation and animation. This process was really fast, just a few button clicks. Next, he showed a few more polished examples such as an image viewer with simple sorting to folders, an album-cover oriented fullscreen MP3 player, 3D Image viewer with images from Flickr. All three of the examples showed off the power of the components that ships with the software.

He also showed off the data binding in Blend, and it really looked like a cooked-up version of what was already in Flash 7. He showed an example where a slider controlled the size of text in a textfield and then expanded upon that a bit. Another interesting choice. The data binding looked way more extensive and flexible than anything that Adobe has ever made, but the point and click workflow for connecting data is the same.

WPF examples
A subset of WPF will be available as a plugin for other browsers such as Opera and Safari, making some of the display features available across Windows and macintosh platforms. He showed a couple examples of possible uses such as a Page flip and streaming video (with DRM) played through the WPF browser plugin.

It is really fascinating to see how much has been lifted from software on other platforms such as cross-application dictionary, the album cover based mp3 player, but we guess this is not just a one way process. It sure feels like Microsoft is the big thief at the moment, but that could be due to all the delays in shipping Vista and other players being faster at getting new ideas to market.

The presentation left me with a lot of questions, but also a little intrigued. Jon Harris said himself that this is not a "Flash Killer" but rather a new tool for the designers toolbox. Since Blend is built by Microsoft, you can be certain that Blend is a good tool for designers working with C# or VB programmers. One big takeaway in the presentation was that the project file for Blend, C# and VB is the same and can easily be moved among the various development tools.

I'm really curious to see if Microsoft thinks that Cross platform is the same as Windows and OSX. Adobe is currently also targeting Linux with both Flash Player and Apollo so if the WPF plugin is available there as well, Flash could actually get some competition.


Read more about or download the beta of Blend here

 

Jens C Brynildsen (December 05th 2006)

 

 

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