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Web Creation Made Easy

mary | 29 March, 2007 07:14

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., is getting serious about Web authoring for corporate professionals. Almost no traces of FrontPage, its previous stab at Web authoring tools, are found in Microsoft Expression Web. Microsoft reduced the FrontPage method of creating Web content to a simple backward-compatible deployment option to help transition customers.

Microsoft Expression Web, the subject of this review, is the suite's integrated development environment (IDE), replacing FrontPage.

At first glance, it looks like an enhanced version of the old Visual InterDev. Like Visual InterDev, Microsoft Expression Web combines hard-core development with HTML authoring. The editor supports ASP.Net's Master Pages. This is a new ASP.Net feature used for developing application-level layout templates. For Web site designers, Microsoft Expression Web supports Dynamic Web Templates, which are roughly the HTML equivalent of Master Pages. Dynamic Web Templates are used for maintaining master copies of HTML page metadata and can contain editable regions for altering content.

Microsoft Expression Web arrives with a slew of commonly used ASP.Net controls for accessing databases, validating content and navigating Web sites, plus a library of WebParts structural and UI controls. ASP.Net developers also can work with XML data sources.

Microsoft Expression Web has inherited Visual Studio's great IntelliSense and code snippets features. The editor includes a style manager that does an amazing job categorizing and maintaining style sheets and has a cool quick text preview pane.

Microsoft Expression Web's workspace provides docking pane views for code, design styles and properties. For each open file, Microsoft Expression Web's main editing pane maintains a list of tags in a Quick Tag Selector Bar. By clicking on the tag in this bar, the editor provides users with content intelligent editing options. For HTML code, the editor knows to only highlight text inside body tags. This is a great feature for finding and editing code quickly.

Microsoft Expression Web will not disappoint novice designers unfamiliar with code. They can quickly create templates and complex pages by dragging and dropping many HTML form controls and page layout tags from a toolbar. For backward compatibility, Microsoft Expression Web includes Microsoft's old Script Editor for VBScript and JScript scripting, as well as an integrated Visual Basic editor for developing VBA macros.