Quartz, Sparkle and Acrylic. Unless you've been watching Microsoft closely in the past years, you're probably not familiar to these code-names that were used for 3 of the Microsoft Expression applications. Today we have 5, and they are named Microsoft Expression: Web, Blend, Design, Media and Encoder. These 5 applications are meant to provide web developers with everything that they need to build cutting-edge websites at today's standards. At the first look you may be a little overwhelmed by the need fo 5 applications to build a website, but once you learn how they work together everything makes much more sense. So let's have a look at each:

Microsoft Expression Web

Think Dreamweaver. You're all familiar to that, right? The memory eating, randomly crashing, yet indispensable Dreamweaver. Microsoft Expression Web is a tool for writing W3C standard respecting markup and doing WYSIWYG page layout design. You could consider a replacement for FrontPage, which is no longer among us. However, there is one important difference to note: unlike Microsoft FrontPage which used Internet Explorer's Trident layout rendering engine, and had a bad habit of generating a whole lot of markup for very little front-end. When it comes to generating high quality standard based websites, Microsoft Expression beats Dreamweaver to a pulp.
It has support for XHTML (obviously), XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, JavaScript, ASP.NET 2.0 and more. Unfortunately there's something missing from the first version, but expected to be found in the next: syntax highlighting for PHP, JSP, ColdFusion and other such languages.

Microsoft Expression Blend

Sparkle lost its name to Expression Blend back in December 2006, shortly before it was released by Microsoft. Think Flash. And unless you've kept yourself to reading only Slashdot.com and Digg.com for the past year, you should've heard of Silverlight by now. It is Microsoft's response to Flash, and even though version 1.0 is missing a lot of goodies, 1.1 has plenty of them and it's only a couple of months away from being released.
Why the Silverlight talk? Because Expression Blend is used for designing XAML based front-ends for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight. It does animation, vector graphics, video playback, 3D graphics with DirectX hardware acceleration and pretty much everything that Flash does, but combined with the power of Silverlight 2.0 it exceeds Flash. However, the true Silverlight integration only comes with Microsoft Expression Blend version 2.0, which is currently in Beta testing stage.
Now you know that Expression Blend can be used for creating interactive, rich graphical interfaces for web and Windows applications just like you would with Flash.

Microsoft Expression Design

Adobe Photoshop / Adobe Illustrator... ever heard of these? Sure you did. That's what Expression Design is looking to replace. While Expression Blend gives you plenty of power to design interfaces, it focuses on interaction and animation. Expression Design on the other hand, allows you to design elements of your layout, such as a logo, buttons or the design of a video player, all using vector and raster graphics.
Unlike the other tools, this one is built on top of Creature House Expression, a graphic design tool that Microsoft acquired back in 2003.

The good news for all Photoshop users is that they can open their existing Photoshop layouts in Expression Design, since the PSD format is supported.

Unlike the other applications in the Microsoft Expression suite, Expression Design doesn't run on Mac OS X.

Microsoft Expression Media

Unlike what you may think, the puzzle is not yet complete. While it is not a critical tool, given all the files generated by the Microsoft Expression Studio applications, there is a need for it: a tool for organizing all the graphic elements that you and your fellow designers created in an environment from where they can easily be shared. And that's precisely what Expression Media is.

Aside from being a tool for neatly organizing your stock photos or graphics created in the Expression applications, it has a web gallery output function, a quick conversion between formats, resizing, printing and a few other similar features.

If you know iView Media, that's the new Expression Media since Microsoft acquired the company in June 2006. It is available for Mac users as well, and it's going to be included in the Office 2008 for Mac suite.

Microsoft Expression Encoder

The last tool in the list is just as interesting and useful as the others. Because of the video and audio streaming madness on the web today, there had to be a tool that allowed you to quickly transform your videos files from whichever format they are into a compressed format acceptable for web playing, as well as to build the video player for you. Expression Encoder will do all this for you. Just select the video or audio file you would like to integrate in your website, select a player skin from the predefined list or create your own (you can use Expression Design for that and then import it in Encoder) and you're all done. Obviously there are a lot of features that will allow you to do some more advanced editing, but you don't need to bother with them if all that you're interested in is to integrate a player on your webpage.