Microsoft has quietly announced that its Expression suite of Web and design-oriented tools is being killed off and phased out.

Vector graphics drawing tool Expression Design 4 has been end-of-lifed. No new versions will be developed, and it's no longer for sale. You can now download it for free, and it will continue to receive security patches as necessary until at least 2015. Microsoft is offering no replacement or alternative to users of the product.

The same has happened to HTML and CSS authoring tool Expression Web 4. It's no longer for sale and no new versions will be released, and it's now available as a free download. Instead of developing Expression Web, Microsoft will continue to extend and improve Visual Studio's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript capabilities, with the IDE now being the company's main actively maintained Web development tool (though WebMatrix is also still being developed). The SuperPreview Remote service that allowed developers to view their pages in a range of browsers hosted on Microsoft's servers will operate until the end of June 2013.

Also being rolled into Visual Studio is Expression Blend, the tool for building user interfaces in XAML. Visual Studio has incorporated some of Blend's capabilities already, and Windows Store apps (both XAML and HTML) and Windows Phone apps use these integrated features. WPF and Silverlight developers should stick with Expression Blend for the time being; however, they too will be able to use Visual Studio 2012's integrated support when Microsoft releases Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, which is expected sometime next year.

Update: Although Microsoft's page claims that Blend will be integrated with Visual Studio, we are informed by Microsoft's XAML tool developers that this is not in fact the case, and Blend will remain as a standalone product, albeit one that is bundled with Visual Studio.

Update: Microsoft has now altered its announcement to affirm that Blend will not, in fact, be integrated into Visual Studio and will continue to be a separate, but bundled, product.

The final part of the expression suite, Expression Encoder, does have a little more life left in it. Expression Encoder is used for both offline media conversion and online media streaming. It already has a free version, with various feature limitations, and a Pro version that adds support for additional codecs (including H.264). Expression Encoder 4 Pro will continue to be for sale until the end of 2013, though like the other products, it will not undergo any future development and there will be no new versions. Encoding, format conversion, and media streaming will all continue to be developed, but as part of the Windows Azure Media Services.

The Expression Studio packages which bundled together various Expression-branded apps are also discontinued and withdrawn from sale, effective immediately.

With this move, Microsoft is essentially ending the development of any tooling that is oriented at design professionals rather than developers. In the light of the company's new, albeit uneven, emphasis on design, this is a rather surprising move to say the least. Adobe is dominant in this field, and it doesn't appear that Microsoft's products were making any real impact on the market (except perhaps for Blend). But now the company appears to no longer even be trying to court designers and have them integrate with its design ethos, such as it is.