While searching for new features and products from Microsoft's breeding ground, I discussed with my team leader Egozi, about nice advanced graphical editor that will be easy to use (not like professional editors and studios like: Photo Shop or FreeHand etc...) to design simple and well graphically designed web controls, like buttons, tabs, tables, grids and more... I wanted a nice graphical editor to create the above controls to be well designed and interactive for my private 'developing at home' application - Haverut.co.il.

He introduced me the Microsoft Expression tool (or product, call it whatever you like...). This product is still in BETA version but it works fine (for the most features I've tried).
The Product contains 3 tools:

• Graphic Designer
• Interactive Designer
• Web Designer

I will focus on the Web Designer CTP1 (Community Technologhy Tool)!
This tool is very easy to use and supplies you greater flexibility to create sophisticated applications and contents. It contains nice code editor, that enables you to write code easily (with extended and comprehensive intellisense), sophisticaed CSS-based layouts, rich data presentation and more.

I played a little bit with that and created nice designed interactive button, that on hover and on click changes its color and design.

The regular design of the button:
The on mouse over design of the button:
The on mouse click design of the button:

And the coolest thing with this button creation is that you don't need to upload images or to create the javascript methods and CSS layouts, you design the button only with the graphical designer and saves the content - the tool generates the code automaticlly and creates the GIF or JPEG files and CSS code.

So go and download this, just play with it from: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx

Bye for now...