Stand Out

Bored of the same old slide show presentations? Tired of linear power point events? Well theres good new for you boys and girls. A product called Stand Out is set to revolutionise the way presentations are given.

Stand Out is currently a beta application that utelises the power of Expression Blend to create innovative presentations, limited only by your imagination.

Blend is used to create components with custom component animation which are later imported into Stand Out and can then be further animated depending on their position on the screen. Using Stand Out and Blend various transforms can be applied giving a unique presentation experience.



Stand Out is split into two major sections, the Design where the lay out, animations and components are added to the presentation in a veriety of way. One great feature of Stand Out is the use of master pages which can be used just as they are in a ASP.NET websites. This then allows the master page to be applied to all further pages, creating a uniform base layout for all pages.



The second section of Stand Out is the presenter section where a presenter can create a presentation using the design that had previously been created by a designer, therefore not having to touch Blend or the more complex sections of the package.

PHP support in Expression Web 2.0

At the end of MIX:UK there was a small section giving us lucky few a glimpse of things to come. During this section we got to see a great application built in WPF looking at CT scans, a talk on multi threading programming and also a quick peak at Expression Web 2.o.

We were shown that in the new edition you will be able to create new pages in PHP!!!!!!!!!

This means there will be intellisense support for php and as php is the most used tool for creating web pages I think this will be extremly influential in getting alot more people to move from Dreamweaver over to the Expression Suite.

Microsoft Expression Web

Microsoft release it's new web development suite "Expression" a couple of months ago, the Expression suite is broken down into four applications Expression Web, Blend, Design and Media. All of which give the user the ability to make in depth web2.0 pages.

I was lucky enough to be given a free copy of Expression Web the other month when I attended the Microsoft SLIDE 7 event. I haven't used any web development products before such as Dreamweaver all of the web pages that I have created in the past have all been done in Programmers Notepad, which I find is a brilliant light weight programming tool for a wide variety of languages. So when installing Expression Web I had no idea what to expect and found the idea of designing and creating a visually pleasing web site quite daunting. However I quickly found that this is not the case, this software is easy to use, it is perfect for beginner Web developers and designers, as well as any developers who want to concentrate on the front end of there site.

The training DVD supplied in the box was extremely good, going through features of the package step by step on screen, however only contained the first two lessons so I went out and bought the full set of lessons and have been going through and now feel confident that I could develop a great website using Expression Web.

The software has some really good features it uses the intellisense from Visual Studio, this is something that I have really missed since I have been developing with java and PNotepad recently and makes life alot easier.
The inbuilt CSS control is also very nice and allows you to move and share styles all through the pages on your site. Even with it being a Microsoft product the ability to preview your site in other browsers such as Firefox and Safari make it great to develop pages that will be displayed correctly in all browsers due to how each of the browsers deal with CSS.

Expression Web also has ASP.NET functionality which I have yet to sample as I am still in the process of learning of learning the technology, but will go back and take a look how much of ASP.NET is supported when I am more proficient with it.

Great software! I am now looking forward to get time to start developing and designing web sites.