Website Development

Because I know I will still need to develop for the IE6 browser for a number of years to come (damn) I have been reluctant to switch to the latest release of IE7 on my workstation.  But, with the advent of a seperate workstation at my office where my team can develop against multiple OSs, browsers and versions of those browsers, I’ve gone ahead and installed IE7 RC1.

I have been very happy with all the improvements in the new IE7 browser and I think it was in Microsoft’s best interest to make this move towards web standardization and recomendations of the W3C, but since then I have experienced issues in Dreamweaver 8.  Specifically, it has been the loss of a select number of Usernames and Passwords saved in my Dreamweaver 8 website projects (each time I restart the software).  This may be purely coincidental, so I posted a question to the Microsoft Internet Explorer Weblog to find out.

I’ll keep you posted if/when I hear something back.

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.