Expression Studio 4 Launch on Jun 7th in NYC!

Expression Studio 4 will launch at the Internet Week conference in New York City on June 7th!

Bill Buxton will be there as our featured guest speaker and many of your other favorite Blenders will be there, too:

• Christian Schormann
• Pete Blois
• Chris Bernard
• Arturo Toledo
• Sara Summers

And I’ll be there as well, with a big smile on my face 🙂

We’ll show the products in action and showcase design agencies who have seen their businesses grow with Expression Studio.

Join us for the launch!

—-

And just a reminder Expression Studio includes Expression Blend, SketchFlow, Expression Web, Expression Design and Expression Web.  We’ve talked about a lot of the new features in Blend 4 (but not all of them!) and now its time to show the new features in all of the tools!

Favorite Tool and Library Downloads for Silverlight

I’ve created my list of favorites tools and libraries and posted them to the Downloads page on the Project Rosetta site.

After posting the updated list yesterday I realized I missed two big ones: SilverSprite and Balder.

Breaking the new list down into categories, I ended up with 3 Essential, 4 Optional and 10 Specialty downloads.

That’s 17 useful tools and frameworks for Silverlight, that are all mostly free and open source.

Thanks Silverlight community, you rock.

What are your favorite downloads for Silverlight?

MediaPlayer control included in Silverlight 3

For some reason I missed this until just recently, but Silverlight 3 comes with a MediaPlayer control courtesy of the Expression team. If you open the Assets panel and search for media, you’ll find both the MediaElement and the MediaPlayer, which you can then draw out on the artboard like any other control.

The MediaPlayer is very similar to the one that ships with Expression Encoder and mirrors the default theme. There is a ton of functionality built in: Playlist, Chapters, AutoLoad, AutoPlay, Offline, Popout, Transport Controls, Progress Bar, Volume Bar, Full Screen and Closed Caption buttons.

The best part is, that like any other control you can just right-click on the MediaPlayer and select the “Edit Template” – > “Edit A Copy…” option and you can modify the template to change the look and behavior of the MediaPlayer.

Another option is to reuse the different MediaPlayers available from Expression Encoder using the method outlined by Tim Heuer.

No need to start from scratch anymore.