Welcome to the January 2006 Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer. This is our first public CTP release and represents our initial opportunity to share our work with you—though it is still very much in progress.

If you are building user experience for WinFX® applications on the Windows® platform, this tool is a great start. Future versions of Expression Interactive Designer may be optimized for other platforms such as the Web and mobile devices.

This release of Expression Interactive Designer is a great way to experiment and begin familiarizing yourself with the tool, but we do not recommend using it for production work. We welcome you try its innovative features such as rich 2D & 3D graphics, animation, dynamic layout, data binding, style & template editing, and resource management.

We are releasing this CTP to give you an opportunity to influence the product early in our development cycle and to help us make a better product with your valuable feedback. You will likely encounter bugs, incomplete features or limitations. Specifically, many of the user interface controls are not fully completed, making some of the functionality difficult to discover. We recommend that you explore the included sample projects and read the documentation. Please send your feedback to us via our discussion forum or our Microsoft Connect program.

Because this is an unfinished product, some knowledge of WinFX (see the Windows Presentation Foundation section) and .NET programming will help you when working with this CTP.

AW: For a demo of Expression Interactive Designer, check out Channel 9's interview with the "Sparkle" team (if you haven't already).

Update: A new video of Expression Interactive Designer is now available from Channel 9.