Expression microsoft review

Once you have the program running, you can choose from a variety of templates to get started with a personal or professional Web site.

NET forms. However, Dreamweaver CS3 does offer more template choices. The interface of Expression Web looks significantly similar to that of Dreamweaver. You can view code or design, or both. Page views, folders, tools and other elements are divided into panes that you can dock and drag and drop nearly anywhere on the screen. Anyone migrating from Dreamweaver should be able to jump right in and use Expression Web without much effort.

Expression Web is even less cluttered than Dreamweaver in this regard. We found it easy to move the same Web pages between both programs without causing problems in the code. Plus, Expression Web supports W3C accessibility standards for designing pages for people with disabilities--a must-have for those creating business Web sites. However, those designing a Web site for the first time may not know where to start when they open Expression Web.

We wonder if Microsoft plans at some point to offer a newbie-friendly application that will offer the hand-holding that FrontPage did. For now, however, options seem limited to the various templates offered by Microsoft Office Live , or even the free Windows Live Writer blogging tool. Expression Web integrates with the other Expression Studio applications, but these aren't all final products yet. The main editing screen is a mixture of Dreamweaver and Office. The editing panes have toolbars at the top, mimicking something out of Word, and are bordered by palettes of CSS and tag properties with Adobe-style, diagonal-cut tabs.

There are no drawing tools or easy drag and drop positioning. This is when you need to turn to the DVD-based training which, while a bit over-enthusiastically American for UK tastes, does cover a lot of useful material and several techniques specific to Expression Web.

Even with the training and the useful tabbed CSS Selector flip-cards, you need to think from the start like a professional designer. This means preparing all the page elements, including basic graphics and photos, before you begin. Expression Web is keyed on structure and Microsoft has taken the opportunity to design the program from the ground up as a standards-based editor.

It has none of the baggage Dreamweaver has to carry for legacy compatibility. CSS is certainly well handled and the CSS palette updates with new styles as you add and edit content.

The palette enables you to view and change any of the properties of a given style in a very easy, more intuitive way than with its main rivals. You can easily flick between design and code views and the code editor both checks lines as you enter them and offers an Intellisense drop-down list for completing commands with a couple of clicks. This speeds up development and helps prevent silly syntax errors, which direct typing can inject into your code.

Dragging and dropping of ASP. Net objects onto your form is really quick and simple and includes some sophisticated examples like calendars and Wizards. Net that Expression Web adheres to. You can also validate your new design against W3C accessibility guidelines which, among others, stipulate that sites should be readable by the visually impaired. Usefully, embedded and inline styles can be dragged and dropped into any attached external style sheet.

Like Dreamweaver, there are Visual Aids accessible through the View menu - colour-coded outlines that show you where CSS blocks and other attributes are in your page. Expression Web's many development features deserve a brief mention.

Adobe Dreamweaver 8 has similar Rich Data features, but Microsoft's drag-and-drop implementation is much easier to use and could help popularise these technologies. There's comprehensive support for ASP. NET in Expression Web - with drag-and-drop components available through the. NET 2. Most impressively, ASP. Unfortunately, ASP. NET is the only directly supported server-side scripting language. We hope Web's Dreamweaver-inspired extensibility features will lead to the development of third-party PHP plugins.

The rendering engine is tied directly to Internet Explorer, but Microsoft has emphasised that standards-based page building is a foundation of the new tool. You can switch to other standards or set preferences so the page previews in 'quirks' mode. There are built-in Accessibility and Browser Compatibility checking tools, though Mozilla, Opera and FireFox are absent from the list of browsers that Expression Web checks your code against - the only browsers it does check against are legacy versions of Internet Explorer.