Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The tool of choice for *designing* ASP.NET 2.0 sites, 19 Jan 2007
If you are a web designer who has gone the Microsoft way, you will by now be working with ASP.NET 2.0, and you will no doubt have run into the limitations of the VS 2005 designer: no support for nested Master Pages, no WYSISWYG for CSS layouts.
That is now solved with Expression Web: Great support for CSS, great rendering of pages based on ASP.NET 2.0 master pages. These features are 5 star.
But this is still a Microsoft product in Version 1: The site management functionality is not great and the ftp facility is downright disastrous: If you work in the UK and your server is in the US, for example, it seems that Expression does not understand that there is such a thing as time zones, so it will report conflicts endlessly, leaving you in the dark as to whether the upload has succeeded. These features get 1 star.
To overcome the site management and ftp malaise, I still use Adobe GoLive, which is just great in both regards. So why use Expression at all? Because it is specialised for ASP.NET 2.0, whereas GoLive, like other HTML designers, is trying to be all things to all designers. This makes them difficult to use in conjunction with VS 2005.
The other failing of Expression is source management. Visual Source Safe does not, I believe, work with Expression (yet). Therefore, back to Adobe GoLive and Version Cue. Or use VSS via Visual Studio.
As far as writing code is concerned, you still need Visual Studio (or Visual Web Designer). But that is as it should be. Expression promotes the separation of the Design workflow from the development workflow, in the positive, enabling sense.
Let's get it straight: Visual Studio is there for writing C# or VB code. Expression is for DESIGN. And it does this really well: its support of CSS is the best around, so it gets another 5 stars for this.
OF LEOPARD'S AND SPOTS
Expression is still very much an MS product in version 1. But it highlights other changes in MS that are interesting:
The curious thing about Expression is the sudden embrace on the part of Microsoft, of DESIGN and CSS. This might be XAML driven: one of the other members of the Expression Suite is Blend, that is the all new XAML designer, and XAML being a Markup Language, will benefit from Style Sheet technology.
But this doesn't explain why MS is suddenly so keen on DESIGN. Is this the first sign of Bill Gates moving sideways, Bill being of the thinking that software should be good enough, which is the philosophy behind table based layouts: They are good enough, or have been at least.
But on the other hand, look at Adobe. It is still choking on the acquisition of Macromedia. Also, compare their corporate websites with the new Microsoft websites: The tables have changed. Suddenly, the Microsoft ones look sooo much better than Adobes, when it was always the other way round.
So... Is this also the first sign of MS sharpening its knives to get into the design software market? Certainly, MS has always had a myriad of pretty useless tools for image editing. At one point, Windows would provide you with 7 different tools that essentially did the same thing, and all equally badly. But now, included in the expression suite, is the all new Expression Design. It is interesting because it combines vector graphics and bitmap image editing in one tool. It is also interesting because it is optimised for producing images for HTML UIs and XAML UIs. Adobe's products on the other hand, are all things to all graphic artists. So for the purpose of designing UI elements, Expression Design shows some intelligent design by MS. And yes, they have designs on Adobe's stranglehold on design software. So the MS knives are definitely out and they are very, very sharp.
But to make the Expression Suite a 5 star product, optimised for working with MS technologies, they still need to sort a few things out. So here's looking forward to Version 2.
SUMMARY
The Expression Suite of tools is designed to promote the separation of design work and coding work. If you are a designer working on websites that use ASP.NET 2.0 pages, then Expression will help you enourmously. If you are a developer coding ASP.NET 2.0 pages, then Expression will allow you to work much more easily with the designers. And if you want to develop websites using CSS layouts, then Expression is also for you.
For everything else, there is always Adobe. Well, for the time being anyway.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A World away from FrontPage, 6 Mar 2007
After a long hard think about purchasing MS Expressions Web, I decided to go ahead and buy the upgrade version. I had been using the beta version for a little while so I knew what to expect. The more I use this programme the more I really like it. Compliant web design made easy. The CSS support is top notch you can just drag your CSS styles from inline into a external sheet, how cool is that!. Flash is a little more complex as EW does not have a insert button as did FrontPage but after a while it does become quite easy, you have to import the swf file and just copy and paste the code into the webpage. All in all this is a great web designing product and not quite as daunting as Dreamweaver8 can be. If you want web standard design with compliant code then this software will not let you down. [...]
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very useful product, 31 Aug 2007
This is a good product. I'm not going to go overboard in saying just how good because the truth of the matter is that I've not got anything to compare it to. I've built webpages using just plain old notepad for a few years now and never really understood the need for html editors. However, as I started spending more time coding I thought it time to investigate these tools.
Dreamweaver has been the lead editor for many years and as I've never used it I can't say if Expression is better. However, this is far far from the old front page. What I can say is that it has made life so much easier. You can set the screen so that you can see the source code and the resulting web page at the same time. You can change the code on either screen and it automatically changes the other. Each code element is in a different colour and as such makes it easier to find elements.
Interaction with the CSS file is done in a similiar way. There are prompts galore and lots of useful tips, especially the one that ensures you deliver 100% compliant code everytime.
Bottom line - if you're still using Notepad, buy this today, it will make your coding life much better.
My first project using this tool was www.freepspwallpapers.co.uk
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