Microsoft's Expression Studio 2 package brings together the cream of the PC giant's Web and desktop design software and, while it's unlikely to seriously threaten the mighty market-leading Adobe kings, there are plenty of good reasons for investigating this collection, especially if you are on a slightly more limited budget.

The five elements that make up the Studio suite are Expression Web 2, Expression Blend 2, Expression Design 2, Expression Media 2 and Expression Encoder 2. As an important addition, Microsoft has also thrown in the standard edition of Visual Studio 2008, which normally retails around the £250 mark and is actually vital when using Expression Blend 2.

Whether or not you have had experience of any of these programs or their predecessors before, it will be worth your while spending time viewing the Total Training videos that have been included as a separate DVD. They are extremely thorough and go through each program clearly and systematically in a step-by-step approach that should enthuse you to get started.

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There has been a whole host of improvements incorporated in the new package. For instance, in Blend 2 you can now design and modify Silverlight 1 websites (unfortunately it doesn't support Silverlight 2, although the forthcoming Blend 2.5 will), there are more animation creations (including reverse storyboards and animated clipping paths), custom fonts can be embedded in your WPF application and there's a new split design/XAML view. You can also choose to work either in Visual C# language or Visual Basic and target .NET Framework v3.5 or v3.0.

Design 2 has improved export options so you can now export artwork to other products including XAML and bitmap files, plus you can export ‘slices' of your document in a range of file formats. Encoder 2 will not only optimise any type of video for Web publishing but will also now edit segments out, as well as make use of intelligent encoding (i.e. automatically re-encode only the modified section of a file to save time and avoid loss) and implements new VC-1 codes.

Media 2 manages all of your digital content and now supports RAW files for photographers. It's introduced a new geotagging function that will geographically locate the origin of any photo containing GPS information. Meanwhile Web 2 now - wisely - supports Adobe Photoshop imports as well as PHP and you can expand your ASP.NET toolset using custom ASP.NET controls. There's also enhanced ActiveX support and improved CSS checking.

Whether you're an experienced or inexperienced developer or designer, there's a comprehensive and integrated selection of design programs here that have excellent tutorial support and, while not as advanced as some of the rivals, still have a number of useful and innovative capabilities. We're not convinced there's enough here to tempt devotees of competing products away, though.