Recently, Microsoft came out with a new tool for HTML and CSS called Expression Web. Microsoft hasn’t exactly had a good track record with web design; in fact I have had a few projects focused solely on fixing sites made with FrontPage. Since I do a lot of work with ASP.NET and most of my own design work, I put aside my fears and gave it a try.
I used it for a few basic projects and was initially not very impressed. For the most part it felt like a less-refined version of Dreamweaver. However, when I started poking around a bit I found that it was pretty good.
For most of my previous projects, I would use Dreamweaver to write my markup and template, and then use Visual Studio to make it work. Dreamweaver’s code coloring and intellisence were just much better for CSS and the split view was very helpful when testing out different font sizes or tweaking colors. The big downside is that Dreamweaver doesn’t support many of the neat ASP.NET 2.0 features like Master Pages and working with server controls was always a little tricky.
This is where Expression Web fills in nicely; it’s almost as good as Dreamweaver for HTML and CSS work and it supports the vast majority of .NET 2.0 features and controls very well. It also does a great job providing some hand-holding for CSS neophytes. The CSS dialog provides some assistance on not only applying styles, but also constructing the selector. The other nice CSS feature is the properties panel, which lists all of the styles that are currently applied to the element, even those that are being overridden. This has become a great tool for figuring out CSS specificity issues.
Overall, Expression Web is a solid tool. It does have some quirks here and there, but that’s to be expected from a first release. It’s nice to see that Micosoft isn’t just improving standards in the browser, they’re also building the tools to back it up. I’ll still keep a copy of Dreamweaver for my PHP work, but Expression Web has definitely earned its place on my hard drive.
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April 26th, 2007 at 1:13 am
“The However”, you mean “However”?
April 26th, 2007 at 1:18 am
Looks like a typo slipped through. It’s fixed now.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Microsoft is too late in capturing the right technology in right time.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
I haven’t had a detailed look at any of this stuff yet, but I’m finding the idea of an ‘Expressions’ suite kinda confusing. There used to be a nice vector tool called ‘Expressions’ that MS acquired. Now the name pops up on a Flash equivalent, a Dreamweaver killer and an interface design tool of some sort. I don’t really understand what they’re selling me.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Hey Alex,
I think the goal is that Expressions will become Microsoft’s competitor for Creative Suite. Right now it’s still a bit thin as there are only 3 products.
Expression Web - Dreamweaver for .NET
Expression Design - The current version of the vector tool you mentioned
Expression Blend - ??? Its not quite Flash, not quite Visual Studio. I’m hoping to learn more at the MIX conference next week.
April 28th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Blend is the Silverlight (nee WPF/E) development studio–essentially a flash killer expressed in XML. The huge advantage for all of those products is that they will be able to understand Visual Studio’s project model and source control bindings. So your massive DNA project team’s designers can work within the same framework as the developers without jumping through any hoops.
April 28th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
This sounds really interesting. I’ve recently been working through an asp.net project using dreamweaver and it definitely could have gone smoother. I’m downloading the trial right now and am curious about what I might find.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:41 am
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September 30th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
musta kyrpa
September 30th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
musta kyrpä pepussa