Sunday, June 19, 2005

Those terrible clever folks at Microsoft....

have been very busy on some new toys to delight developers and arty folks...

I've been playing with a couple of new beta releases of upcoming Microsoft products aimed at very different types of people but which as a web developer are going to have an impact on my workflow...

The first is Code Named Acrylic - in actuality version 3 of Expression, a Photoshop type tool Microsoft recently acquired and have been working on. It's still a bit rough around the edges but quite usable. As it's still in beta at the moment it's not too late to make your 2 cents be known via the feedback forum.

The second is Visual Web Designer a stand-alone Visual Studio subset aimed at ASP.NET web development. VWD is a complete environment for the creation of fully former ASP.NET 2.0 applications (needs ASP.NET 2 so remember, at the moment it's Beta only). Again, it's early days for the product, but it's incredibly stable and capable. If you've not tried ASP.NET development yet this is a very good heads-up on what you can do and how easy it can be....

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