MIX09 Announcements

There are lots of cool videos of demos and discussions over at Mix09 today. If you haven’t been there you should definitely head on over.

http://live.visitmix.com/

There are lots of cool announcements for new features for the next version of various Microsoft products. Too many for me to even enumerate in a single blog post actually but what’s really exciting is that I finally get to tell everyone what I have been working on these last couple on the job at Microsoft.

I have been working with a small team of developers, here in Minneapolis, who are responsible for the Photoshop Import feature of expression studio. It’s been a very interesting an exciting project so far and it seems like something that developers and designers are both very happy about. Here is a screen shot from the Mix demo site.

We’re able to read the layer information from a Photoshop file and import them as separate controls into Blend. Once there a developer can make those generated layers into real interactive controls like anything else in Blend. There is also a re-import feature to ease to workflow from designer to developer. This exact incarnation of the importer is available in the build of Blend 3 Preview, so download that and give it a shot! Feel free to send me feedback if you do try it out.