Microsoft Expression Blend is Microsoft’s user interface design tool for creating rich graphical interfaces for web and desktop applications that blend the features of these two types of applications. Expression Blend is itself written using the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Expression Blend is effectively an interactive, WYSIWYG front-end for designing XAML -based interfaces for WPF and Silverlight (Blend version 2.0 onwards).

A trial version of Expression Blend is available. A preview version of Expression Blend 2.0 is also available which supports developing Microsoft Silverlight browser-based Rich Internet Applications providing animation, vector graphics, interactivity and video playback capabilities.

Microsoft has a product called Microsoft Expression Web , is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program by Microsoft , replacing Microsoft FrontPage . It is part of the Expression Studio suite. Expression Web is targeted toward professional website designers.

Expression Web allows authoring of web pages integrating XML , CSS 2.1, ASP.NET 2.0, XHTML , XSLT and JavaScript into sites. It requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to operate. Its sibling is Microsoft SharePoint Designer . Expression Web uses its own standards-based rendering engine, different from the browser-based FrontPage, which uses Internet Explorer’s Trident engine. Microsoft claims that Expression Web’s rendering engine currently provides the most accurate standards-compliant rendering on the market, especially CSS rendering.

On December 8th the newest version of Expression web was released to the public. I’ve worked with this product and honestly believe it’s a great tool to use in website creation.