You may have seen Microsoft® Expression® Web Designer coming a little while back. This is Microsoft’s ramped-up attempt to grab some website development market share away from Adobe® Dreamweaver. Although, the main problem I see in capturing any new portion is that there is no support for .PHP (likely though with a language developer creating the product).
The software (known earlier as Quartz) was first publicly annouced back in September 2005 at Microsoft® Professional Developers Conference. In May 2006 the beta was released and as of late they have posted the first CTP for download. This release promises to help you deliver and manage:
- Standards-based Web sites
- Sophisticated CSS-based layouts
- Extensive CSS formatting and management
- Rich data presentation
- Powerful ASP.NET 2.0-based technology
Wayne Smith, product manager for Expression Web Designer …We did our research; we heard time and time again that standards were important. So we wanted to create a Web design tool that met the needs of the professional Web design community…
I would have to say this alone should be a huge improvement over working in the Visual Studio 2003 environment on the .NET Framework 1.1 alone which is what I am tormented using at present.
I will continue to post my likes and dislikes as time progresses. If anyone will save me the grief of finding the dislikes and tell me I should stop right now, by all means please do. I like to keep my self-inflicted torture to a minimum.
Personally, I have not used it – but it doesn’t look completely promising. I would say the same about dreamweaver, I think its ’sophisticated css-based layouts’ are crap. Sure, they might work – but they are littered with divs an spans all over the place to get the job done. How is this any better than tables or using font tags all over the place? Using CSS to your advantage means using it in a professional manner, understanding the DOM, inheritance and cascade. Otherwise, the code becomes just as bloated as if you were using tables. I don’t care how sophisticated a program gets, it will never be smart enough to create complex CSS based layouts.
Standards based? By whos definition? Microsoft? If so – that’s bad news. I would be interested to hear more about what is entailed with ’standards based’ development. Again, I fail to put my trust in a program to make a site complete accessible (without bloat or misconceptions).
I would be interested to hear more about what you have to say after using it over time (maybe even see some of the code it puts out)…
Thanks for the heads up!
I think your comments are very well thought out and delivered, I was going to upgade VS 2003 to 2005. So I could use it with Expression web which I do like a lot, but it will not install on Vista ultimate x64 which I find annoying. Yes I have been told it will if I do this or that, but then Vista says not working with no solution availible.