Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 on Dreamspark!
August 18th, 2009, Paul , Tags: dreamspark, Expression Studio, free, XNAIn the words of Hubert J. Farnsworth, "Good news, everyone!" – Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 are all now on Dreamspark, free to students! Expression Studio 3 brings some awesome improvements to.. well.. every product in it – Blend 3 + SketchFlow, Web + Super Preview, Encoder now has screencasting.
Expression Studio 3 Highlights
- Expression Encoder 3
- Improved H.264
- VBR Smooth Streaming
- Source CODECs
- Audio Enhancements.
- Performance
- Live Encoding
- Screen Capture
- Improved profile pallete
- Silverlight 3 Media Players
- New player skins
- API Enhancements
- Win7 Integration
- SDK "in the box"
- Expression Blend 3
- SketchFlow – Sketch WPF/Silverlight interactive prototypes.
- Photoshop and Illustrator support
- Styling Controls: Creating templates from artwork
- Styling Controls: Creating TextBox Templates from Artwork
- States: Improved Support for VSM
- Interactivity: Behaviors
- Working with and Generating Data
- Expression Web 3
- Super Preview – view side by side comparisons of your website in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6/7/8 and more
- Publish with SFTP/FTPS
- Improved Photoshop PSD support – import just the layers you want!
- Silverlight support – uses Expression Encoder 3 to encode (nearly) any video you want to Silverlight and embed on your site!
- TFS SC support
- Deep Zoom Composer support
XNA Game Studio 3.1 Highlights 
- Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
- Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
- Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
- Full screen video playback
- Video playback to simple textures in game
- Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
- Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
- Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
- Play back multiple video streams at the same time
- Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
- Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add custom types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
- XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
- Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.
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