One year after the initial release of Expression Studio second version is now ready. That’s right, new versions of all products in the entire suite, including Blend, Web, Media, Encoder and Design. I’m not going to list all the new features, but rather highlight some of the features I find more interesting.

The two biggies in Blend 2 is support for .NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 projects and Silverlight 1.0. In terms of Silverlight features you now got full design time support for layout out your application, creating animations and editing the JavaScript code. That’s right, Blend now have a JavaScript editor built in.

Another Expression tool I’ve played around with a little bit is Expression Web. Before 2008 I used Expression Web for all my CSS editing, but after the features got included in VS2008 I haven’t used it that much. The big news in Expression Web 2 is support for PHP. Yep, Microsoft now has a supported PHP editing tool! The cool thing about the PHP support is that you get to preview your site with out having to run IIS or Apache. This is big news for the PHP guys! Another important feature is offcourse support for including Silverlight in your web application. A subtle is the new black theme which aligns Expression Web UI more with the rest of the suite.

I haven’t played that much with the other tools in the Expression Suite, but I really want to pick up drawing again and learn how to do 2D vector graphics in Design.

As for availability and pricing you can pick up Expression Suite for $699 from retailers such as Amazon and Best Buy beginning mid may. If you’re based in Australia another good idea is to attend REMIX in Sydney or Melbourne ($199) and receive a free copy of Expression Studio 2.

Now to the tricky part… The big thing that’s missing from Blend 2 is Silverlight 2 support, which is pretty obvious since Silverlight 2 is currently in Beta 1. So personally I’ve already moved to Blend 2.5 March CTP where I do all my app design. Microsoft hasn’t made any announcement on what the upgrade path will be for Expression Studio 2 customers. One possible approach could be to release Silverlight 2 support as a service pack to Blend 2, or perhaps offer a cheap/easy upgrade path from Blend 2 to 2.5. Hopefully this is something Microsoft will clarify.

There is also a new Expression site up which has all the details about the new release, what’s new in each product as well as links to downloads.

For all the details about this release, check out the official announcement.