Things I learn't today.

I learn't some stuff today. Nothing life changing but interesting. I spent the day at a Microsoft information workshop demo presentation thingo. And it was kind of interesting.

So the first thing is that Microsoft has this product, we could call it a "suite" of products called Expressions Studio. It was news to me. But there were a couple of really interesting bits. First the Encoder product has a screen capture tool and a webcam broadcasting feature. Which was pretty damn cool.

The next thing is they have this other product called Blend. And let's be honest here, it's trying to be a flash "killer". That's a long road to travel down BUT, I was impressed that the file format was XML. Well it's called XAML, but you get the idea.

Also I saw XNA 3.1, and it was cool but I was mostly impressed with the automatic method creation button in Visual Studio. Looking at it from a person who teaches Artists how to program I'm sure most of the class would run to the hills if I told them they had to work in XNA. But Visual Studio will become a good addition to the advanced students.

Now why is all this interesting you ask? Because of this site . Everything on that site is free to any student and faculty staff member. And that's a free perpetual license FOREVER.

I literally heard the words "Free, really? wow, that just saved us a fortune" and this from a high school teacher who was complaining about the cost of the Adobe Creative Suite to teach a bunch of students a product that they can't afford.

Sure the education pricing of Adobe products is good. But it's not FREE.

7 years ago I didn't think a Microsoft console would outsell a Sony console. I'm going to pick the underdog here. So if, and lets be honest it's a big if. If in 5 years Expression Studio overtakes the Creative Suite in the number of people using it, then I just want to say I called it.

MattD