Ok, if anyone reads this, I'm sure that I'll get lots of comments about how other programs have had slices for a long time. But I'm not using other programs. I'm using Expression Design and I just started playing with Expression Design 2. One of the best new features is the ability to create slices of designs and export the slices as separate images.

Where do slices come into play? They're very handy for web applications. Let's say that you want to build a region on the web page that will have rounded corners. Using Expression Design, I can draw the rectangle with rounded corners and apply graphical effects such as a fuzzy border. When I have the rectangle the way that I want it to show up on the screen, I can start slicing up my image to create the graphical elements that I'll need for rendering the rectangle on the web page.

With the slices selected, I can then export each slice instead of the whole picture and save the slices as PNG images which I can then embed in my web page using CSS background attributes.

Slices are a great addition to Expression Blend and will make building web application designs so much easier.