Guest: Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Guest: Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Host: Robert Scoble - ScobleShow

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
You have to make to sure you get your Microsoft visitor badge on camera because that's a milestone, isn't it? Because, you used to have a blue badge a long time...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. I once went to select my badge (Inaudible).

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Pay for one doesn't work.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, where are we? We're in building...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
We're in building 42 in the heart of Redmond, the heart of the Empire where everything happens, all the magic.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
This is where all the cool stuff is happening.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
That's right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Don Box (ph) is probably right above us...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Don Box (ph) is above us.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Doing something secret and...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, I'm sure it's cool I don't know if it's secret. We've got...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Voice Overlap) tell me what he is working on (Inaudible)?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
That's cool. We've got a great programming weather today as you can probably see out the back; it was raining buckets this morning.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Actually, it's great shooting weather because it puts a real nice diffuse light and it must be bright.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Oh, good.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
And make sure this is open out by slight, which is -- and you go to (Voice Overlap).

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yeah, that's right, that's right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
So, what you guys do? Well, first of all, who are you?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
So, I'll start, that's okay. I'm Eric Zocher and I'm the General Manager of the Expression Tools Group at Microsoft and so I'm in-charge of the three products that we're working on for Creative Professionals and...

Wayne Smith _ Microsoft Expression Team
And I'm Wayne Smith; I'm the Product Manager for Expression Web, one of the Expression Products.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
And the first one that will appear, so that's why, we love to show it to you.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What are the three tools just to -- I have heard the name Expression and they're not yet paying, it's for you guys that you haven't shifting. So, tell me what are the three tools?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
So, the three tools are Expression Web, Expression Graphic Designer, Expression Interactive Designer and you might have heard them under their code names, which were Expression Web was called 'Quartz' as a code name, Expression Graphic Designer was called 'Acrylic' and Expression Interactive Designer was called 'Sparkle.' So, you probably -- we've been talking about them since PDC of '05 and we actually had CTPs of all of them up and now. Wayne's team put the Beta up of Expression Web in the start of September.

Wayne Smith _ Microsoft Expression Team
That's right, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
What you guys do is becoming more and more important everybody, I was just over another company with a name that started with a 'G' I think you guess and who's that -- little interesting upcoming company, I think you've heard of Microsoft.

Wayne Smith _ Microsoft Expression Team
This brings to mind.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
No, I'm just joking. But what is it that your team is trying to do? What changes have been in the Web development space? Are you seeing and who are you trying to get into the Microsoft family that is not in the Microsoft family today?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Well, I think the real big thing is actually kind of rewinding a little bit, Microsoft has -- obviously, we had FrontPage for many, many years but...

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But, FrontPage 1.0 user...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Alright, but FrontPage was intended to be a very, very broad tool, usable by Information Workers, usable by Designers, usable by Habeas, and Expression Web by contrast, in fact, the whole Expression family is really intended for Creative Professionals that actually make their living, designing and building Websites, and the big thing that we're doing is actually realizing at Microsoft that more and more creative professionals are having a big impact on interactive experiences that are delivered primarily through the Web but also on the desktop as well, and so the Expression series of tools is really about building for the designer, the really robust professional tooling that we have in Visual Studio for the developer and in fact, we're working really closer with the Visual Studio team, so that designer developer teams can effectively collaborate without throwing Photoshop files over the wall to one another. So, they can really work together on their actual scene, for example, XML, or XML technology they can work on the same XML files back and froth.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now, you've already said a whole bunch of words that (Inaudible) last all the designers.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yeah, except the Photoshop.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Designers yeah, when I talk of designers they understand Photoshop or Illustrator or Flash or some of these design surface tools and they don't understand what XML/Mac and also they don't understand -- they don't use FrontPage and all that anymore designing tools.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Sure, yes so FrontPage, is gone now actually. Microsoft has actually two new Web Development Tools and Expression Web is the one that we're associated with and we'd like to show you today too. The other one is SharePoint Designer, which is specifically for editing SharePoint sites, and there is no FrontPage anymore and we're going to provide an upgrade path for people to Expression Web and so FrontPage, we have some things that are there to make is easy for former FrontPage users to use the product.

But the products was designed from the beginning to really focus on the current Web standards, it has really good support for CSS, which we'll show you it supports XHTML and HTML, XSLT, XML all the things designers hopefully recognize some of those. So, it's actually designed from the ground up for kind of a more professional audience. And XML, we won't talk about too much today because that's the actual Markup Language that's used by WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and it's the language that you can use to clearly specify user interfaces for Windows Applications and that's what the Expression Interactive Designer does, it's a XML editor that let's you edit.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
We should explain by the way, if you heard noises in the background; this is right in the middle of building 42, so we will be walking behind this and there will be some noise. But it's the new video (Inaudible) and that's professional.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
That's ambient video; we could use video anywhere; we could be always on camera.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Now what makes Microsoft think that they are going to convince the designer to use their products? Microsoft's aren't known for strong, tatharthy (ph) or graphic design tools. You didn't have PageMaker as part of our history; you didn't have that graphic design background. So, why do you think you are going to get any designers to pay attention for you?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Well what we have done is, really design products with designers in mind I think for the first time if you look back. PageMaker is a great example. Of course we had and have Microsoft Publisher, but it's designed for the information worker for the more mainstream audience, for the business audience. It's part of the Microsoft Office family; and that's more the history of Microsoft up to this point. But, because we see designers playing a larger and larger role in developing software, we see that as part of Microsoft's core mission obviously is enable people to develop great software for our platforms.

Now, the designers are such a key part of that, we really think that we need to take that super seriously and make tools specifically for them. We actually have a team in Expression that's little bit non-traditional composition for Microsoft -- of course there a lot of Microsoft people that have built a lot of things like Office and parts of Windows and worked on Xbox and so forth that are parts of the team. But, we have a number of people that had built this type of tool before and so -- that have really served this audience in the past. I used to be...

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
We interviewed Emmanuel Clement and he was famous flash developer.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Absolutely, so we have people on the marketing team - I mean, on the development team that have worked at Adobe and Macromedia and Avid and Soft Image and other companies that have made serious professional tools that everybody would recognize. And Wayne could tell you about his background as well; he has also been in Web Design for a decade and about as long as you could be. And so, we really have -- we have done the traditional Microsoft thing of taking just some generally smart people who know how to build software, but combined that with some people that really know the marketplace.

And when you see the Expression tools, I think you'll see that they are a real different kind of approach to the whole kind of tooling. We've paid a lot of attention to the way that you can arrange your workspace; we have multi-monitor support in everything and we can show you in all the palettes and property sheets and stuff thereof, and you can arrange those in anyway you like and there is lot of focus on the actual design surface where you are actually doing your work, so you can see your work, and I think when you see the whole family of tools that we have, it will open a lot of eyes because it's a very different look for Microsoft stuff and a very different kind of new approach.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How are you doing it?

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
I think there is another reason as well on top of what Eric said, which is why designers are all going to care about the stuff because we are going to see, in over a short space of time now, development companies and development teams reaching out to designers because they want their applications to look better, we are in an area now, where we'll want better user experiences; anyone go look at Vista and Office 2007 to see how that new design looked to them really sort of, singled out as being very, very popular. So, development teams who traditionally maybe haven't spoken to designers too much or even sort of, cared much about them are going to stop reaching out to these designer shops. And so, designers are going to get knocking on the door saying, "Hey we want you to help us design these Windows up."

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, I'm certain you guys have seen that in the startup role that's (Voice Overlap) that if you want to get audiences to check out your website, you got to look better.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
You got to look great; you got to really stand out

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Not only look better, but you have to have better understanding of how people use web and use computers.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
And these are all skills that designers bring to the table, and traditionally, that's for sure, decades and decades, it's been designers that have pushed the boundaries on all this kind of user experience. And now we get into an area where that's going to come to play with software as well.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
There in fact are -- there is some new Microsoft people in new role, and that's real interesting development that shows how seriously we are taking this. I am sure that you've spent a lot of time over the years with the developer evangelism folks at Microsoft, and that's one of the real big important groups here that takes the message out when we have new technology. We actually have some new people worldwide, called 'User Experience Evangelists' or UXEs and they were all hired from the design industry by and large, and they were a set of folks that were going to go out and talk about this phenomenon that Wayne was talking about, to go to some of our large enterprise customers and talk to them about the impact that really having great design can have on how fast you can train, and so the UXEs, I think we'll basically tell that story of what we're trying to do with Vista and with Office and with the Expression Tools. And that's a kind of thing that probably wasn't announced separately, because its kind of a quiet thing that we're doing, but we see this is as much a part of software design and Web design that we have a dedicated evangelism team for it like we do for the developer side, and for the business strategy side.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
You guys could really have a deep impact on the next version of Windows after Vista, don't you think it. I remember the interview where we interviewed the manual and who is the developer in that Oracle video, but the developer and designer and -- when I've got (Inaudible) of Microsoft, and I saw all the Flash videos or the Macromedia Designer video, Macromedia Director videos of Vista, and that was Longhorn in back then. Tell me a little bit about the design process of Windows, because Windows itself -- usually you have a bunch of user experience engineers to go off and study customers, and try to come up with new ways to make Windows work better, and they do all these Macromedia loopies (ph) basically to explain the vision of Windows, the next version Windows And then they hand it over to developers, the developers started laughing, right, (Inaudible) you had to deal to build that, or they try to build it for two years and then going, "No, no we can't really build that," or it doesn't work the way, your Director movie (Inaudible) work, because Director is not really doing a database, calling through a database or calling something else. Explain how that's going to change in the future?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
So, the real big work flow that you're getting out in the example that you talked about is between Expression Interactive Designer and Visual Studio, and the way that those two products worked together the XAML language that I mentioned. That's actually an XML based markup language for specifying all of the user experience of an application that includes all of vector graphics, raster graphics, 2D and 3D graphics. It includes things like controls and animation and that's all integrated, and it's the way that you basically specify a user interface, and then when you have XAML it can be directly executed by Windows Presentation Foundation. So, basically workflow there is a real simple one, both of those tools can work on Visual Studio project files.

So, you either have a developer basically get some functionality up and running, and then pass that project over to designer, and the designer can directly manipulate the user experience, create all the XAML for it, layout the interface, change the flow of the user experience just directly, instead of making a markup or a comp of it (ph), or conversely the other way around, a designer can start by actually doing the look and behavior of an application, the surface behavior, the flow of things in XAML and Expression Interactive Designer then make them throw that Visual Studio project over to the development team, and those folks can write the C# code or whatever, CLR based language they want to use, to actually implement the application.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
It should shortened the time to market for a minute (ph) a developer starts thinking or a designer engineer should think about the problem and at the time that product actually ship, because your design can go straight in the coding without any translation.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yeah translation or sort of...

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
And translating between a developer and a designer sometimes its a pretty tough task.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
That's right. So, the old build notion of sort of what was -- what were paper, kind of storyboards of things, or kind of sketches of things. Some people storyboard or wire frame in Visio or they actually make comps (ph) of the details of the pixels in Photoshop, and they just kind of throw it over the wall to the developers, and then developers kind of scraps their heads and eventually try to reproduce that. This is actually a very direct -- you're basically working on the same project very directly, and any change to the animation interaction that you make in Interactive Designer, is directly reflected the next time the software has built and you can just try it out right away. So, we hope that, that will have a big impact on kind of how streamlined software development is.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
That's the Sparkle tool which is -- a new name of that (Inaudible)?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Expression Interactive Designer, yeah.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Expression Interactive Designer (Inaudible).

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yeah, that's fine.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
But let's back up to the Wayne, because that's the tool (Inaudible).

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yup, that's what we like to show you today too. That's what we beta at the start of September, and Wayne can demo some of the great things about it. It's a very different tool than FrontPage was; it has extremely strong support for standards. There's some really cool unique CSS features that a lot of people are responding to in the beta that are people will or want that.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Right there you said three separate things that -- tell me a little bit about how much have you seen the Web changed. In 1994 a Web page was static ...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yeah, it was HTML.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Today we're seeing -- tell me a little bit about what you're seeing in terms of the Web? What is the Web and how is it different today than it was a few years ago? Why is Expression Web Designer, the tool to help you build the new kinds of sites that you're seeing companies and people (Voice Overlap).

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
I'll get started and then I'll let Wayne kind of, roll it, but basically the big things of course going on, the really hot thing is Web 2.0, and of course we have real strong support for ASP.NET 2.0 in the tool, and also the new ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX controls that we have that we just recently announced, and that we've been baiting for a while. And that's kind of the biggest change going on; and of course HTML has evolved to XHTML, and CSS has come of age, And of course, that's the really, really big thing from a designer perspective we think. All right Wayne, take it from here.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Some of the things that we're clearly picking up, and it's not just -- and it directly were, she getting direct feedback from the safety base and betas, we've done off the product is the -- which finds to get engineering now, whereas standards do matter. People really want to be designing websites based on standards; it matters to people for all kind of reasons in terms of speed of loading, interfaces, indexing, search engines etcetera. People understand the need to go down the standards route, and they're looking for tools to help them do that, because at the end of the day standards are just lines of mumbo-jumbo from the W3C site that people need to digest and understand; whereas a designer needs a visual tool to do that. He doesn't want to sort of, care about what's going underneath, he wants a visual tool that's going to work to those standards and that's what we've got with Expression Web.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
I can just hear a whole part of the audience going, "Microsoft guy is talking about standards, we don't believe them."

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
We should show you actually.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
Yeah, we'll see a way, but why should we believe that Microsoft is now going to support fully the web standards out there, when in the past they haven't always fully supported them.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Yeah, and even you need to check out the tool, the betas out there, the trial version will be available soon; and just look at the code it produces. It's all standard based. It's based on XHTML as Eric said, Cascading Style Sheets, XML, XSLT, all of the standards defined by the W3C, not Microsoft, and we're working and playing with them very, very nicely. And the entire model, the entire throughput, a website isn't just a website, it's very often these types of Web Application, and that's where we got the ASP.NET 2.0 languages. We have some incredibly rich features for doing these web applications. People are looking these days for AJAX'es, AJAX, AJAX - people want these things, and at the moment, to be perfectly on is, AJAX to many people is rocket science, it's like, I haven't got a clue where to stop with it.

The things that we're doing through the ASP.NET AJAX extensions, all the sort of functionality people are looking for on websites to do this kind of technology, but in very simple declarative Markup languages, that's easy to use. You can do it in Visual Studio; once you got the stuff installed you can use it from a code perspective in Expression Web, and it's giving the chance now to do AJAX type stuff with fairly simple markup that's understandable, and it's all standards based as I said, it runs across a range of browsers across Apple and Macintosh as well as Windows. It's the kind of stuff we hear people are wanting, and hopefully, we're trying to deliver that.

Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
One problem with AJAX -- one reason a lot of normal developers have trouble with, is we don't have rich tools for Java Script. You look at C# or VB and .NET, and you have beautiful debugging tools and code help tools, and yet, I started typing online a code in VB and it practically writes the code for me almost you know. In JavaScript, we don't have that style or tool do we? Now, are you moving towards that, giving us that kind of JavaScript environment?

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
We've taken some basic constructs of what people are looking for in AJAX, and tried to build those as simple ASP tags -- ASP.NET tags. So, for instance, one of the big things that people love about the whole AJAX thing is this ability to build websites, so they don't refresh, the pages don't refresh, they are there all the time, you make a change of some kind and you just space (ph) in the browser, the white screen doesn't appear. So, you might bring that to happen through your Asynchronous JavaScript; it's a tricky thing to do. So, we built an update panel tag in AJAX that just -- you just drop in as a simple panel; bang, it's done, and the page no longer refreshes. It's simplicity in actually getting this stuff done. There are loads of technicalities in the background, but that's hidden; that's all sort of kept away from the designer and developer. We're trying to make it simple; we're trying to make it so everyone can do it, as opposed to just a few who can actually understand the underlying technologies.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
And the other thing I wanted to say about that is that -- what Wayne described as what we do on the Expression side. On the Visual Studio side of course they're investing more and more in JavaScript debugging, but you'd have to talk to them about exactly what they are doing in the WAN and of course, they're the ones that pioneered all the IntelliSense technology that you are talking about. We have some -- we have that for HTML, XHTML and so forth on the expression side but we're not focused on the actual debugging of JavaScript. What we want you to be able to do is, use AJAX without writing JavaScript - stuff that's actually been battle-hardened libraries that you must be able to use off-the-shelf by dragging the controls on your page and visually setting them up like the update panel.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
When I first started doing web stuff in - let's just go through the progression of what's happened on the Web. In 94, I mean, guys like you and me would hand-code everything; and we'd open visual notepad. And we -- typing <B> and our text, and then we would do tables and all that stuff. And then tools like FrontPage came out; the reason I started using FrontPage was, I instead could type in code like that just to get a freaking paragraph or text out on the web. And then CSS came out, which made it easier to separate the design and hand a design to a designer without making him touch my content because my work -- the works that I wanted to put out to the Web, why does this designer need to touch those? The designer needed to touch the color and then graphics and the layout.

And today, I don't use -- I don't use a FrontPage tool to write my content; my content, I'm writing in a blogging tool. In fact, I'm using Windows Live Writer. That talks through an API to WordPress which then publishes my content. And my design was designed separately from that whole process in HTML editor. Where does your tools fit in that kind of role, because I'm now seeing more and more preparations moving toward that kind of a publishing model. I mean, the reason I'm here is for the Blog Business Summit tomorrow and we're talking with John (Inaudible) and Boeing and we're moving more and more toward a blog publishing model rather than a FrontPage Publishing model where it was a page publishing model. I used to actually have (Voice Overlap) I wanted to get new content up, I'd open up FrontPage and hit New Page, open up the template and then start typing in a little box. Now I don't even touch that, I just go to my...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
So, what Expression Web is for, its not for your daily blogging, its for actually designing your site and then redesigning your site when you do that; that's what its for. And so it's for the folks that in -- in a hosted blogging tool, it's for the folks that are designing the templates for the blogging tool, that are designing experience to the blogging site. And so, it's actually not for the day-to-day publishing of things, where we have a really established form now like a blog or a wiki or something like that; its actually for the actual, kind of, structure of a site and its for the structure of a page, and then it's really nice actually that content publishing has moved so far so fast with so many different tools. And so we really see that as definitely something that we are embracing with the tool that's very different from the FrontPage, especially early -- from your FrontPage days.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
And When you look at all the blogging sites, obviously, in terms of the content, as Eric says, the content is derived from backend systems, but many blogging sites, you are able to skin your site in many -- hundreds of different colors and styles and things. And those colors and styles of course, are all CSS. So that's really where we contribute to that part of it is we have to design so, to help people create skins around those experiences.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
And so, what...

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Some, like moveable type has a little bit difference and Microsoft has whole content management platform, that you are trying to get people to use but not everybody is going to use that and some might use the regular type, some might use WordPress and some might use something that a kid comes out with tomorrow and (Voice Overlap) everybody's leg. How valuable is your tool, how it can fit -- does it fit in with other publishing tools or only with Microsoft?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
So, to the extent that tool is based on CSS and then on -- maybe its on HTML or XHTML tags or extensions, then it fits in really well, you can actually design the CSS in our tool. You can actually -- there's a code view and a design view which you'll see. And so if you need to put in custom tags, you can do that you know, like the ASP.NET tags that we do. So you could basically do any kind of template stuff to the extent that something is a publishing system that is leveraging the standards like CSS, you will be able to use this off-the-shelf with that tool. You may have to go through their page where you upload templates obviously. So, we will look at all those types of tools and look at where tighter integration makes sense, but as far as actually getting the pages looking the way you want, building kind of new page styles or new page templates, we definitely are -- that's one of the core scenarios that we are for.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
And this is version 1.0 of Expression Web you are talking about.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
And this is version 1.0, exactly. And so, we started in this century building this and so, we get to live in the world where we know that there is literally thousands of publishing systems like that. And so, actually one of -- I'll actually talk about the other product that we mentioned which is called SharePoint Designer. And SharePoint Designer of course is deeply integrated with SharePoint in terms of styling and publishing to SharePoint sites because it was specifically made for that purpose. And so, they have done some really cool things that we'll certainly look at with respect to other kinds of publishing systems that are out there as far as post 1.0.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What's the coolest thing about Expression? Especially your (Voice Overlap)?

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Expression web? To be honest it...

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How would you show a developer or designer (Voice Overlap)?

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
In terms of coolness, I mean, sometimes its hard to standards to be cool. A lot of what we do that is really cool, is the fact that we work with standards, but if I had to post our file, I think the way we manage CSS stalls is incredible. It really is, I think we're a leading edge in terms of the way we manage CSS rules. And the visibility, we get the designer into the whole rule process. So many designers it seems these days, actually want to be interacting with XML; they want to get XML onto their web pages, putting in RSS feeds -- whatever it is, quite a Mashup type stuff.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And that's just a whole topic we should type out.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Sure. We've got great support for Drag-n-Drop XML and working with its sister technology, XSLT in the background. All visual work - and then it actually gets written in the background in the correct code. So that's one of the most visually appealing parts, this ability to work with XML. And I think this ability to work with the -- there's a whole range of ASP.NET controls as you'll note. The list is huge for ASP.NET version 2.0. And the fact that you can drag them into the design surface and they render in the design surface and you can design around them. It's not just about the code behind; it's the look and feel of the control. That's one of the exciting things as well. It's down to standards at the end of the day; that's really the core of what we are doing and that's what we are most excited about.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
And new things around those standards that design templates you haven't seen before.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Now we were -- this morning we were over at Zillow, which is a real estate Website. And they are announcing API in two days; and they are not the only ones. Every Web 2.0 startup lately has been out announcing an API, so that a web developer can take their service and mash it up with another service, like Flickr or (Inaudible) or Google Maps or Virtual Earth etcetera. What are you guys doing to help a Mashup artist? Because that what -- somebody like me who is going to build a Website or a Weblog, I'm going to have my content down the middle and I'm going to have all sorts of Mashups on the side, or I'm going to build services that take data from Zillow, which is a WEST API and mash it up with a Virtual Earth API, so I can show what the house looks like on a Virtual Earth map or something like that.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
I think at the end of the day, it comes down to what the API pumps out and what it is and we'd be hoping in this day and age that the exchange format for all this kind of data is XML. It's the standard -- the whole world is moving around with data; so assuming that this information is coming backwards and forwards in standard XML packets, we are in great shape. It can be consumed in the design surface and Expression Web. If you need to go a bit deeper, you need to sort of really get into it and start doing stuff that's in land of application role, which is (Voice Overlap).

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
That's in Visual Studio actually where -- of course, its really, really easy to create and consume web services, so if you actually have something where you're actually picking out something that's returned from a WEST API and then doing some -- making some decisions based on what you get back, and then sending it to another -- sending it to another web service to get something more back, that's more the realm of Visual Studio and ASP.NET. And we have got lot of power there obviously.

Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
If I'm a guy; I am seeing a lot of these Mashups come out of the 18, 19, 20-year old kids, and they're not Visual Studio kids, right? At least, they don't think of themselves -- they'd only think of Visual Studio, because say, I'm a web developer, I don't hear the words Visual Studio come out of their mouth. So, why would I consider Visual Studio, if I was one of those kids?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
You need to actually look at what specific API you are talking about; so like, if you are talking about being able to do a really rich query into the Amazon API for example, and if you wanted to make your own kind of, custom bookshop management thing. If you'd look at the Amazon APIs, the SDK, the main books, like 300 pages, and that's not something that you can just manipulate by taking the XML and applying XSLTs to; you actually have to write some code to do that. So, there are lot of really cool mashups where you can basically -- or basically the APIs were really meant to kind of, plug together really easily and maybe you could do things with Javascript in the page, but then there are others that are kind of deeper things. Like, if you want to upload new items to an eBay auction -- of course, there are a lot of desktop tools for Windows that do that because they're using a very, very rich API there that's sending up a lot of information per push when you are posting an item to auction. So, it sort of, depends on what you are putting together. That's obviously something we'll pay very close attention to, because it'll be kind of neat if you could just -- some kind of pluming metaphor, plumb things together in an interesting way. And especially -- we've got stuff that's in that direction with what we do with XML and XSLT. So we actually -- we write the XSLT for you on the fly based on the style that you want to apply to the XML, which is a totally new thing.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
And also, although (Inaudible) B part of the Visual Studio team; I think really that's where the Visual Studio Express skews a very much aimed at that younger market coming out of college and whatever; it's a very approachful way for them to get into these programming models and then sort of move up to the full power of the Visual Studio skews as and when they need to. So, I think this is a story for them as well.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How are backend's of websites changing? I see that they are changing dramatically and if you take into account the MSN or the Windows Live side of the house, or Google side of the house (Inaudible) these guys are building web -- apps web services that run on hundreds of thousands of machines.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Are you guys looking at that kind of development, or even WordPress runs on local machines.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Absolutely.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Are you working at making it easier to build a service that runs on many machines or is scalable so that if you get rapid traffic growth you can keep up with the new demands? Even Zillow mentioned this; they said their business plan a year ago, they thought that they would have a million users today and they already have three and a half million. So, they are growing three and a half times faster than they had planned for their business.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
...planned for, yeah. Absolutely.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And so now, there is this stuff that sometimes they are down because they told us, a developer said, "Hey, sometimes our systems go down and we didn't plan for this and now we have to rethink everything we're doing..."

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Well that's something that Microsoft is definitely worrying about; and our particular tool, because we are very focused on the actual design part of things, scalability is not something that we are really specifically focused on in terms of web infrastructure. You'd have to talk to the ASP.NET folks and the IAS folks about that and then what Live! is doing that's more platform like -- 'platform in the sky' type of stuff that they are doing, of course that's a huge focus because Microsoft has some of the highest traffic websites in the world and so it knows a lot about scalability with things like Xbox Live and Stuff too -- tons about scalability. In our particular case, that's something that in the case of WordPress they -- we're really focused on, is like building in the publishing system examples you were giving, building the template and then letting the actual system itself take the template and propagate it out and so there's nothing really special that we are doing because when you want to share that template among 20 machines or 30 machines, everybody that's built that type of website has the infrastructure to do that if they are using Microsoft CMS, since CMS takes care of that for you. If you build your own infrastructure, like a lot of the really large sites have, they of course have their own way to propagate their data, usually around the world to different data centers and to translators and things like that. So, that's something that we haven't had to worry a lot about, but certainly all of our brethren, lot of whom are in this building, have spent all their time on that; they are people that just focus on scalability.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
The interesting part of it, in what we are trying to do on the very front end, the designer side of this, we are the front end to a whole application stack, right through all the scalability models. It's a great end-to-end story for technology really and that's -- yes, we're at the front end, at the design end but the overall story is a very deep and broad one, and that's where we are excited to have these design tools to put the polish and the shine on the front end of this great underlying technology. So, we are part of the overall story.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
The one thing I will add though is, skeptics that maybe are familiar with FrontPage as five years ago, eight years ago; if you want to see how different we are in terms of making really tight, efficient Markup, just go, download our trial, download our Beta now or a trial when we post that, and just create like an XHTML 1.1, do a new, and you'll see there's just a tiny -- it's actually the minimum size Markup that you can make. And we don't mess with any code that you write, and we make really tight, absolutely standards compliance stuff, we actually will tell you when you are violating standards and we have support for all the script in transitional of HTML and XHTML. And so it's a very, very different thing than your father's FrontPage -- or your old -- Scoble's FrontPage, Robert's FrontPage (Inaudible) 1997, it's a different -- it's nine years later and things have changed a lot - we've adapted.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Well, I know exactly where it got that bad reputation because it would stick a lot of coding...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Would stick a lot of coding, yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
But a hand-coding, like if we were hand-coding we wouldn't have stuck in.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Right.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And also, I often pissed off to hand-coders because we would hand-code something in Visual Notepad...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Great. And it would change your indentation.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
(Voice Overlap) change everything else. Why did it do that?

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Where did that stuff come from?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And then particularly, if we were trying to write standard based codes off to the site and then stick it in the tool, we would change it to non-standards based code it's like 'aargh!'

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Right, it's totally different. I invite anybody that is curious about that to try to experiment, just make it a new empty XML or XHTML file or CSS file. Actually an empty CSS file and has nothing in it.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Completely empty.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Completely empty if you do that, so it's all like you would hope very, very standards compliant as the first priority and focus on making things tight and minimal as well. So, it's obviously important when you are serving millions of visitors.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
One last thing; since the web is a worldwide thing, not just an American thing, what are you guys doing to make it easier to develop Chinese web pages or Iranian web pages or Farsi web pages or?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
I'll let you talk about that; like the Unicode features -- character encoding features and stuff.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
I hate to -- and you keep coming to these Web standards again, but that's what it is all about. We have the Unicode support in the tool, we have the foreign language versions for those dialects to actually get better, do the stuff in the way that they do through their cables and operating systems. So, it's actually a part of it; and it's down to -- if you encode your pages using the appropriate modern standards, you get that stuff for free; its just part of the experience and because we are working with these standards, it works.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Now, as far as making Live multilingual websites, that's something that -- like ASP.NET does that, if there was a multilingual WordPress that automatically translated to you, it would actually, obviously take your text and have the different versions of it and will be the language setting. ASP.NET does that inherently and so when you actually want to have something that has like a Live four language version, that's something that the tool makes it easy to do with ASP.NET.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Anything else I should know about the Expression Web or Expression family as well?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Well, Expression Web is the first product that's going to come out; we've been talking to Beta a lot.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
When does it...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Pretty soon; we're quality driven, the Beta is going extraordinarily well and we are getting really close to the end game.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Do you know approximately what it will cost? How I'll buy..?

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
We actually haven't announced that yet. We haven't announced the retail pricing for it. That'll be happening very, very soon. When we are ready to ship it, we'll actually go public with all the details about the whole suite and I think we'll do that when we make Expression Web available.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
URL to find everything is...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
...is microsoft.com/expression -- not Expressions, those are greeting cards. Expression which is about creative expression.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay. And anything else I need to know about the Tool Center; what you guys are doing?

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Go download it; go download it and play with it.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
I hope you all can download too we'll run that separately.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
Sure.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Good.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Thank for this little chat and...

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Thanks for coming by Robert.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
...and giving the latest on Microsoft's view of the Web and so it going to be fun to see what you ship.

Eric Zocher - Microsoft
Thanks. (Inaudible) your time.

Wayne Smith - Microsoft
We Got security to show you out.