At the end of February 2009, Microsoft released the second service pack for Expression Media 2. Now the Redmond company is cooking a replacement for Expression Media SP2. The refresh is designed to resolve the various problems that users of the solution have been stumbling upon following the integration of SP2 RTW (release to web). Anita Oakley, a support escalation engineer for Expression Media, emphasized that Microsoft did indeed listen to its users, and that the replacement for Expression Media 2 SP2 was an illustrative example in this respect.

“The development team, testers, and your support team have been working hard to get a replacement for SP2 to you as soon as possible. Most of the issues have been resolved, and testing is underway,” Oakley said. “Based on user feedback we will be removing asynchronous rendering from the product with the replacement service pack. Rendering in Media and Light Table views will default back to the way it was done in SP1.”

On February 25, 2009, Microsoft made available for download Expression Media 2 for Windows Expression Media 2 for Mac OS X. The download links are at the bottom of this article but I would advise you to stay away from the bits until Microsoft provides the replacement and deals with the problems introduced by SP2. On March 5, 2009, Oakley detailed the exact issues affecting SP2 and promised that Microsoft was laboring to address them.

“I’m sorry to report that we’ve discovered two rather serious problems with SP2 in all languages: as several threads have discussed, we have two rather bad issues connected to SP2: even if you have offline previews built, they won't show in the Media View; [and] asynchronous rendering may get stuck if you page through images in Media View or the Light Table. We have found a fix for offline previews, and it's currently in testing. As soon as we feel confident that the fix does not have any undesirable side-effects, we will release an update. The asynchronous rendering issue is still under investigation. When we have a fix for it, we'll test and release it as a hotfix as well,” she stated.

Microsoft Expression Media 2 for Windows is available for download here.

Microsoft Expression Media 2 for Mac OS X is available for download here.