What happens when a group of passionate evangelists, Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft Regional Directors get together, listen to customer feedback and advocate on behalf of you, the developer and the customer? Massive changes to existing go-to-market plans and more products at your disposal to make building the best applications ever even easier!!

Today, Soma Somasegar announced that we are making Expression Web and Expression Blend available to anyone with an MSDN Premium Subscription, but I wanted to take a moment and provide you with a peak behind the curtain at how - unknown to many of you - there was a huge amount of advocacy on your behalf to make this possible.

We've have had a very vocal and long running debate inside of Microsoft that spanned our Developer & Platform Evangelism teams, MVPs, Regional Directors, product managers - the whole gambit! - for the past few months. The debate centered around whether or not our new Expression line of products would be available to developers with an MSDN Premium subscription.

The go-to-market plans around Expression were originally designed such that Expression Web and Expression Blend were for the "designer market" not the "developer market," and therefore would not be made available to developers through existing MSDN Premium subscribers. Instead, these products would be made available at a steep discount but would require an out-of-band purchase to acquire. However, everyone above - myself included - went to the mat to be your advocates in pointing out that the line between developer and designer is not always so well defined.

You see, we have lived the life of the developer. We know what it means to have better tools for building better Web applications. And with the introduction of Windows Presentation Foundation - a technology that borrows many concepts from Web-based design - we know that having kick ass design products for creating stellar Web and WPF applications is a must-have for our development community.

Visual Studio 2005 is the best development tool on the face of the planet. How do I know? Every developer I've seen use it does not want to give it up - and that includes some staunch Java converts I've known in my career! And while Visual Studio 2005 enables you to create Web and WPF applications, it will never win over the hard-core design market, nor does it make design of advanced user experiences very easy.

All that changes with Expression Web and Expression Blend. If you've never spent time with design tools, the experience is likely to feel a little odd. And that's by design. Expression is targeted at the design market - and designers do think differently than developers. However, everyone's voice made it claer that developers frequently do cross the line into the design realm and could create even more compelling applications if provided with the same tools that designers have at their disposal.

The result is today's announcement that Expression Web and Expression Blend will be available via MSDN Premium Subscriptions. So, if you're a Visual Studio 2005 with a MSDN Premium Subscription, you can download Expression Web today from MSDN Subscriber Downloads. You can also download the release release candidate of Expression Blend which will also be available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads when finally released. And what if you don't have an MSDN Premium Subscription? Then go download the trial version of Expression Web and see what the buzz is all about.

In summary, I do not recall a more long-running and passionate set of conversations in favor of developer advocacy like this in my 10 year career here at Microsoft (not to say that they haven't happened, but it was awesome to see this one evolve.) It makes me proud to be a Microsoft employee and a Developer Evangelist in particular. As this is a substantial change to the original go-to-market plans it should, once again, demonstrate Microsoft's deep commitment to listening and responding to the needs of you, our customers.

Now, go grab the tools and start building the most compelling applications your users and customers have ever seen.

[Edited to make it clear that this effort was put forth by Microsoft MVPs, Microsoft Regional Directors and a ton of passionate folks within Developer & Platform evangelism.]