Microsoft Expression Web Designer - Dreamweaver Killer?

By
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!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more