First off, I really, really wanted to love Microsoft’s latest graphics tool, codename Acrylic. I down loaded and install the first public beta, and wasn’t impressed, but hey, it’s an early view into what they are doing, so I decided to cut them some slack (it is based on Creature House Expression, which MSFT bought in 2003). I recently installed the latest tech preview (Aug. 2005), and I’m really having a hard time working with it. Now, Forest Key (a Product Manager) has mentioned that "Acrylic is not Expression Studio verbatim There may be some relationship between Expression Studio and Acrylic, but it's not one and the same.", which is a good thing, since I had envisioned a more Visual Studio like development environment, than the floating windows style of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. As a .Net developer who has worked with Adobe to improve Illustrator’s SVG capabilities, from the point of view of a vector graphics artist I've got to say, I hate Acrylic. There was a long period of time that I wished that I could merge Illustrator with Photoshop, so that I could create vector and raster graphics in one tool, but over the last year I’ve started to see the error in that line of thinking. Both styles of graphic development take different mind sets, and putting it all in one UI makes it hard to distinguish between the 2 styles. I’m not saying that it can not be done, it just will not be easy, and the current Acrylic UI doesn’t help. If MSFT wants to lure the Illustrator or Photoshop artists (and those are 2 different talent pools) to use a tool to create XAML based on Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly codenamed Avalon), they are going to have to do better than Acrylic and make it easier for them to transition their knowledge to WPF. I know that may mean dropping my VS.Net style UI, but it would be worth it.
One of the things I noticed with the Aug. CTP is that can't import or export from Illustrator, which was listed as something that could be done in the previous beta release, but didn’t work when I tried it (and I reported it as a bug). Thankfully, Michael Swanson created a plugin for Illustrator that will export XAML, so that I can continue using Illustrator, and still be able to generate XAML based WPF.