Microsoft Expression Web Designer - Dreamweaver Killer?

I looked at the beta of this but now its for sale (you can download a fully functional trial here) and all I can say is, "this thing totally rocks!".

You get advanced WYSIWYG design support for any kind of ASP.NET or HTML page, CSS taglets that actually show you what the rendering looks like (you can just highlight an element in Design view and right-click on a CSS style and choose "Apply Style"), and (Damn - I don't know how the HELL they do it but...) the ability to import a complete ASP.NET web site -- over HTTP -- and start working on it! It's got features up the GAZOO and it's also very easy to learn to use.

I gotta tell ya, this is the engine that will be built into Visual Studio.NET "v.Next" (Orcas) as the built-in ASP.NET HTML editor designer, and if it's gonna be anything like what you get with Expression Web, you can just take your Dreamweaver 8 and uninstall it, because there isn't much of anything I can think of that you would want to keep it for!

It takes a lot to get me excited about a new piece of software lately, because I've become so jaded from all the hype, but in this case I am happy to make an exception!

Comments

  1. Anonymous11:19 PM

    "productname-killer" is so overused. Zune is not an iPod-killer. Expression Blend is not a Flash-killer. Expression Web will be a Dreamweaver competitor. No more.

    Uninstall my Dreamweaver 8? The same chance of that happening as Expression Web running on a Mac, where many Dreamweaver installations happily reside.

    Expression Web isn't bad. It also isn't Dreamweaver.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jaime6:16 AM

    Haven't had enought time to play with it. Must be fiddling with all the menus in dreamweaver.

    ReplyDelete
  3. peterbromberg7:27 AM

    Re: Productname-killer. Yes, it's overused. But obviously it still has effect, vis-a-vis the comments attracted. Regarding vs. Dreamweaver, that's obviously an individual decision. This is a Microsoft product, designed primarily to deal with Microsoft technologies, Dreamweaver is not.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous7:38 AM

    I think you're right - Expression Web will probably kill (or severely harm) Dreamweaver on Windows for one simple reason: Visual Studio integration. It gives teams the ability to get the designers and developers working on a common platform. As more web shops are coming round to the idea that developers are not designers (and vice-versa) this will add real business value to development tool integration.

    On the other hand I don't see any of the other web-focused expression products unseating Flash (too prevalent) or Photoshop (too good) anytime soon.

    ReplyDelete
  5. peterbromberg7:02 AM

    Yep. I think you have hit the nail "right between the eyes".

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous10:07 PM

    No, I don't think so. I'm an avid user of Dreamweaver, when I was using Expression Web I constantly found myself swapping bewteen VS and EW... they do one job ok, but suck at the other, IE: Studio is great for coding and sucks for web design, Expressions is great for the design but I find the coding lacking.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous9:44 AM

    Whether you spend time swapping between the two is dependent upon your development process. When developing ASP.NET apps I tend to create unstyled 'structure-only' pages in VS and deal solely with the functionality of the application. The style sheet doesn't usually get added in until later. The good thing about following this development pattern is that it scales out well when the designer(s) and developer(s) are different people.

    The great thing about Expression Web is that you can take a VS solution, load it into EW and start creating stylesheets without having to create a runtime rendered page first. So it doesn't matter that you have to swap - the point is that in a source-controlled environment designers don't have to/can't mess up the developers .aspx/.cs/.vb etc files.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous2:24 PM

    Could someone give me some real good advise on which one to use for the design i want to do? I've never worked with dreamweaver and I've only worked with ms environment, VS and frontpage. always had a passion for design but didn't get a chance to untill now. the design is for the company's intranet and i am willing to pick up either one of expression web or dreamweaver. what i want to achive is to make the design work. i will need the website to have dynamic information through out the page since it is for intranet that is like the central info portal for the company. i have worked mostly with asp,javascript,vb with mssql. so which one shoudl i use? help!! thanks!!!

    ReplyDelete

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