What the WPF/E?

I've been tinkering with Microsoft's new suite of tools called Expression lately and I have to say that I am quite impressed with Blend in particular.

I have always felt that the bridge between designers and developers was one that was way too long to cross. Inevitably, the designers' work seemd to always suffer in the hands of developers due to their lack of design skills (I'm not bashing developers, we wouldn't make it without them, it's just that code and pretty aren't part of the same skill set).

Expression Blend attempts to close the gap between design and development by allowing the designer to create user interfaces and interactivity from within Blend, and then hand it over to the developers to add their code and such. The coders never have to even touch the design assets as Blend exports everything into XAML, a new type of data storage, and seemlessly integrates with Visual Studio.

And to add icing to the cake, Microsoft is in the process of closing the gap between browsers and OS users by implimenting this XAML technology and Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or WPF/E, into existing browsers. This lets anyone, using any major browser, on any platform have the ability to view and interact with rich, dynamic, and...ehem...3D content without any hassle.

Most of the technolgy is currently in the beta stage, but I am definitely keeping an eye on all of this stuff and will be writing about it quite often.

To illustrate my interest in this new tech, here is a link to a fairly cool video series by Martin Grayson that demonstrates the possibilities with XAML and WPF.

And here's one I found on YouTube: