After months of top secret work at Microsoft my labors are nearly realized. Yesterday Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 were released as an RC. If you haven’t checked it out you should definitely go and play around with the new bits. Here is a overview from Soma himself:

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/07/10/launching-silverlight-3-and-expression-studio-3.aspx

Specifically I worked on the Photoshop Import functionality found in Expressoin Blend, Design and Web. It has been an exciting and rewarding project and I’m really looking forward to what is coming up next!

One of the other cool features to check out which was created by fellow Minnesotans, is Sketch Flow for Expression Blend. It’s a cool tool you can use to quickly prototype new applications and features.

In his latest blog post Soma did a feature preview of the new version of Expression Web and the Photoshop importer gets an honorable mention.

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/06/05/expression-web-3.aspx

With Expression Web 3, we have significantly improved capabilities and workflow when working with Photoshop files. When you import a PSD file, you can choose just the layers you want to import in to your website. You can save the layers as JPG, PNG, or GIF and scale the image* before saving the individual layers in Expression Web 3. If the source file has changed, Expression Web 3 prompts you to update it.

*Actually, you can’t scale the imported image in this window but you can zoom in or out of the preview to view it scaled and you can adjust the quality if you select jpeg. Once it is imported you can scale the dimensions of the image with your image editor of choice.

One interesting thing about the Photoshop Importer is that it is an expression wide feature rather than simply for Blend. Specifically it will be a feature available in Blend, Web and Design for this release. In each application the importer will have slightly different behavior. For example in the window shown here you can see there are options for Encoding and Quality as well as a field displaying the estimated size. When you import a Photoshop file in Web you will get a single flattened image rather than multiple resources like in Blend and Design.

Designing the importer so that it could be extended to support different feature sets for each application was one of my main roles so far. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot!

Janete Perez has created a great series of blog posts on importing Photoshop files into Expression Blend. I have been apart of the Expression team for almost a year now and I have been working on the Photoshop Import feature, so these posts are especially interesting to me.

http://blogs.msdn.com/janete/archive/2009/05/27/photoshop-import-in-blend-3.aspx