Testing Expression Design Beta 1

I recently downloaded the latest publicly available beta of Microsoft Expression Designer, which at this time is Beta 1. The beta itself is easy to install, however I had some real trouble to install the pre-requirements (.NET 3.0) on a Windows XP machine that had had several beta versions of .NET installed. Nonetheless, I got it working in the end.

The Expression product appears to work pretty well for a beta release, and I found the interface to be quite intuitive. Feels like an old Adobe product called ImageStyler, which I liked a lot for its simplicity. It is also very neat to be able to use the Edit / Copy XAML command (Ctrl+Shift+C) to copy any object(s) to the clipboard in XAML format, or simply export the whole drawing (file) as a XAML file.

You can download your own beta 1 release from Microsoft's web site.