Professor Geek

I have spent quite a bit of time this past week putting Microsoft Expression Web through its paces. I have used FrontPage (which is going away … replaced by Expression Web) and Dreamweaver, as well as some other, lesser, tools. I think Expression Web, with a few modifications, will be a top-tier web development tool.

What are the tweaks? Well, here are a couple of things that I found:

1. Dreamweaver is great for PHP scripts. Expression Web doesn’t handle them at all.
2. Dreamweaver handles Java scripting while Expression Web does not

But there’s a lot to like, especially if you do a lot of development in ASP.NET:

1. .NET 2.0 objects are available for use right from the toolbox. That said, they seem to need some additional configuration that might only be available by using Visual Studio to play with the code-behind.
2. If you used FrontPage in the past, and still have a website on a server with FrontPage extensions installed, you can use the FrontPage login instead of FTP. Why is this important? If you use a hosting provider, they normally will only allow you either FrontPage access OR ftp access … not both.
3. Your new code is completely XHTML complaint. No more goofy extensions like FrontPage had. No more non-standard pages that can’t be rendered well by non-Microsoft browsers. I think Microsoft learned their lesson here … sometimes proprietary solutions exclude a lot of users.
4. The interface is similar enough to FrontPage that FrontPage users should have few transition problems with Expression Web.
5. Expression Web can convert current FrontPage sites to standardized sites. Once converted, you won’t be able to use FrontPage any more. Why would you, though, if you had already moved to Expression Web?
6. Expression Web is part of a larger suite of programs that will directly compete with the Adobe suite. The additional packages will begin arriving after the first of the year.

One drawback. If you have used the non-standard Sharepoint in your organization, you have probably used FrontPage 2003 for design tasks. A new package will be available to handle Sharepoint. Apparently, it is basically Expression Web with additional Sharepoint-specific capabilities. I haven’t looked at it yet, so I’m not sure of the differences from Expression Web.

I’m continuing testing. My next task is to set up an ASPX site with both Expression Web and Dreamweaver, both alongside Visual Studio, so I’ll rep;ort on that after I have completed the testing.

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