Expression Studio 3, XNA Game Studio 3.1 and Robotics Studio 2008 R2 on Dreamspark!

In 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.

MIX09 announcments: Silverlight 3, Blend 3, IE8 and more..

MIX09 has been and gone, with many announcements. What is MIX?

"MIX is a Microsoft conference held annually for web developers and designers at which Microsoft showcases upcoming web technologies. The conference is held each Spring at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas."

via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIX_(Microsoft)

Some of the announcements were…

• Silverlight 3
• Improved media experience, now with H.264 and AAC
• GPU acceleration, shaders, perspective 3D support (can be applied to controls, images, video, you name it)
• Support for deep-linking, navigations and SEO support, Clear Type and multi-touch.
  Deep-linking means you can have foo.com/silverlightapp#page501 and you’d be taken to page501 of the app, rather than having to reload from scratch.
• Silverlight outside of the browser – for Windows/Mac – very similar to Adobe’s AIR platform.
• 40kB smaller than Silverlight 2
• Expression Web 3 +  SuperPreview (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/try-it/superpreview/). SuperPreview lets you test your designs in multiple browsers…even if they aren’t installed on your computer (by using a free Microsoft service)
• Expression Blend 3, apart from adding Silverlight 3 support, there are layout improvements, IntelliSense for VB.NET, C#, and XAML.
   
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0. Model-View-Controller pattern implemention for ASP.NET. I’ve been reading the first free chapter of the Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 by Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, and Phil Haack available under a Creative Commons Attribution/No Derivatives license. It’s 185 pages, ~14mb PDF.
• Web Platform Installer 2.0 – installs all you need to get started developing or running the latest web platform stuff from Microsoft OR PHP on IIS
  (check out Scott Hanselman’s blog post on it)
• Internet Explorer 8 – Monash MSP’s posted on this