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<title>Expression Web Designer Information and Resources | Expression Web Designer | Expression Web FAQ</title>
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<description><![CDATA[Expression Web Designer Articles and Information. Expression Web FAQ and much moresss.]]></description>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:15:28 -0500</pubDate>
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	<title>Microsoft's New Web Developer Suite</title>
	<link>http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/Microsoft-s-New-Web-Developer-Suite.html</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:15:28 -0500</pubDate>
<category>Expression Web</category>
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	<description><![CDATA[Microsoft has a history of entering markets that it has previously overlooked. Its entry into the Web publishing market is no exception. But after years of minimal effort with FrontPage, Microsoft (Quote) is making another move with an entire suite around its Expression technology for both Web and application development. The company will release Expression Studio, a Web development suite consisting of Expression Web, which will replace the out-of-date FrontPage; Expression Blend (code-named Interactive Designer) for designing Web-based interfaces; and Expression Design (code-named Graphic Designer) for designing visual elements for Web and Windows applications. The two new parts of the suite are Expression Media, a digital asset management tool geared toward managing metadata and XML tags, and Expression Media Encoder. This tool will encode video for use by a new library, making them playable in any Internet device, whether desktop or mobile. The new library is WPF/E, or Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. WPF/E is a &quot;lite&quot; version of the WPF library found in the .Net Foundation 3.0 and is meant for running on smaller footprint devices. Blend is in beta, Design is in community technology preview (CTP) state, which means pre-beta, WPF/E is entering CTP today and Media isn't even available for CTP. However, the whole thing will be ready by the second quarter of 2007, according to Brad Becker, senior product manager for Expression at Microsoft. &quot;Now we have the ability to blend the best of the Web, its design qualities and user focus with the power of the desktop. That's what our tools are enabling,&quot; said Becker. With Expression Studio, Microsoft is aiming for three development markets: the standards-based Web, which is what Expression Web is for; the richer Web experience, which WPF/E will deliver; and the &quot;ultimate experience,&quot; which uses .Net, the full WPF library, ClearType fonts, anti-aliasing and the GPU. The latter will be for installed applications, working in tandem with Visual Studio 2005. Instead of using the forms builder in Visual Studio, designers can use Expression Studio to design a rich interface, and developers can build the computational back end in Visual Studio. Expression Designer is used for building scalable vector graphics for use in these applications, either Web apps or desktop apps. Blend then takes the graphics to build an interface. Developers then build connections between the interface designed in Blend and their application in Visual Studio. David Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow, said there is a &quot;hidden war&quot; between Microsoft and Adobe (Quote) that's about to get a lot more attention. &quot;It doesn't get a lot of press or attention but it's going to be one of the next really big things,&quot; he said. Smith called the Expression Studio a &quot;solid offering&quot; that will boost its presence among Web developers. &quot;For Windows and Windows Live, they obviously feel this is something critical to the success of those platforms. Any time Microsoft isn't getting the hearts and minds of developers, no matter what kinds of developers they are, they think it's a shortcoming, and that opens up a competitive hole.&quot; Expression Web is available for an estimated retail price of $299. FrontPage users may qualify for a $99 upgrade. Expression Blend will be available for $499 when it ships, while Expression Media will cost $299 when it's available. The full Expression Studio will sell for $599. ]]></description>
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	<title>FrontPage Replacement Out In Beta</title>
	<link>http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/FrontPage-Replacement-Out-In-Beta.html</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:14:58 -0500</pubDate>
<category>Expression Web</category>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/FrontPage-Replacement-Out-In-Beta.html</guid>
	<description><![CDATA[Microsoft's Expression Web design tool is one step closer to the market, along with a new beta and a shorter name. The product formerly known as Microsoft (Quote) Expression Web Designer is now Expression Web and has entered its first public beta after several months in the Community Technology Preview program. Expression Web is Microsoft's first serious entry into the Web design and publishing market. It had a Web designer in the form of FrontPage, but FrontPage was never meant for heavy-duty Web page development and has fallen significantly behind in keeping up with the advance of new Web technologies. Microsoft decided to simply toss the whole thing and start over, although some elements from FrontPage have been saved for Expression Web. Expression Web will offer a much more professional environment for Web developers who know their HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XML, XHTML, and XSLT. Microsoft was much more mindful of Web standards by adding a built-in auditing panel to test pages for standards compliance, and removing some of the old proprietary FrontPage extensions. This public beta pretty much contains everything that will be in the final product. Microsoft hopes to have it out by the end of this year, or early 2007 at the latest, according to Wayne Smith, senior product manager for Expression Web. As with other Microsoft beta software, the company is looking for a wide range of testers. &quot;In testing a product, you can&rsquo;t recreate every type of Web page that's possible, so we&rsquo;re looking for standards compliance feedback for all types of pages,&quot; said Smith. Although Expression Web is meant to offer a more comprehensive product than creaky, old, FrontPage, Smith said it's still approachable by beginners. &quot;Just because it&rsquo;s a professional tool doesn&rsquo;t mean it&rsquo;s a complex product to use,&quot; he said. &quot;We tried to make the UI as approachable as possible. There's no reason less-skilled people can&rsquo;t use it to make a Web site. There&rsquo;s something there for everyone.&quot; Despite the presence of established Web design tools like Dreamweaver, Greg DeMichillie of Directions on Microsoft thinks there's room for a product like Expression Web. &quot;There's always room for more Web tools, frankly, because none of these tools are so good that that's all anyone would need,&quot; he said. &quot;From what I've seen, Dreamweaver has its own limitations, so I think there's room for MS to try and do a different and better Web editor.&quot; ]]></description>
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	<title>Adieu FrontPage, Hello Expression</title>
	<link>http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/Adieu-FrontPage--Hello-Expression.html</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:14:27 -0500</pubDate>
<category>Expression Web</category>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/Adieu-FrontPage--Hello-Expression.html</guid>
	<description><![CDATA[FrontPage has been a part of Microsoft Office for several versions, but beginning with Office 2007, if you want to do some heavy-duty Web page editing, you will need a whole new, stand-alone product that Microsoft has just begun beta testing. Microsoft (Quote) today released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Expression Web Designer, the successor to FrontPage as Microsoft's Web page editor. FrontPage joined the Microsoft family in 1996 when the company acquired Vermeer Technologies, which developed the HTML editor. Several versions of Office later, FrontPage hasn't been upgraded anywhere near as aggressively as the other Office applications and is simply too old and out of date to be merely revised, said Microsoft. Instead, Microsoft developed a whole new Web editor. Some pieces of FP technology have been retained, but by and large, Expressions Web Designer is a new product designed to be fully compliant with all of the new Web standards, said Microsoft. &quot;We realized that people do things in a way that may have been appropriate four or five years ago but are not appropriate by today's standards,&quot; said Wayne Smith, product manager for Expression Web Designer. &quot;We wanted to take a step back and come up with a new way of doing things, with a radical, clean approach to Web site building.&quot; This fresh approach means support for new technologies, both from Microsoft and from outside the company. It will offer much improved support for cascading style sheets (CSS), allowing developers to work visually with any version of CSS they want, said Smith. Expression Web Designer will also support ASP.NET 2.0 controls, which can be dragged and dropped onto a Web page and configured to the style people want. Expression has much better XML and XHTML support, which will help in building things like RSS feeds or data from other sources using XML and XSLT for the transforms. By supporting Web design standards, Web pages developed in Expression will look the same whether viewed in Internet Explorer or another browser, such as Firefox, Smith said. Expression will come with connectivity tools for building connections to back-end databases. ASP.NET will help build connections between Web pages and Microsoft databases, and any database with support for OLE DB. Expression also comes with reporting tools, to generate reports on site errors, accessibility issues and traffic. Replacing Expression in the Office suite is Sharepoint Designer, a program for document management and intranet functionality, but not Web design, said Smith. Keeping Expression out of Office was the smart thing to do, Greg DeMichillie, lead analyst for developer tools at Directions on Microsoft, in Kirkland, Wash, told internetnews.com. &quot;This needs to be something that comes out of the developer division and needs to be integrated with the developer products,&quot; he said. FrontPage had outlived its usefulness, particularly as an Office component, he said. &quot;It started out as a tool for people who didn't know much about Web design or HTML, and that audience kinda vanished. Today you have professional Web designers and there is no way they'd use FrontPage.&quot; DeMichillie said he'd only seen demos and had not had hands on experience yet, but liked what he did see. &quot;It looks like one of the nicest Web tools for being aware of style sheets. A lot of people want to design Web pages using style sheets, and that's where FrontPage was really, really awful.&quot; The other part he found encouraging was the support for all browsers, not just Internet Explorer, something FrontPage was useless at doing. &quot;It appears to have nice support for allowing you see how it will look in all browsers.&quot; Smith said he is &quot;pretty confident&quot; Microsoft will have Expression Web Designer out in late 2006. Pricing has not been determined. ]]></description>
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	<title>I Love Microsoft Expression Web Designer testing</title>
	<link>http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/Microsoft-Expression-Designer-testing.html</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2007 21:13:07 -0500</pubDate>
<category>Expression Web</category>
<guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.ExpressionWebs.net/info/Expression-Web/Microsoft-Expression-Designer-testing.html</guid>
	<description><![CDATA[I love Microsoft Expression Web Designer because it always makes me happy to see the improvements they make. I love Microsoft Expression Web Designer because many web designers out there may have heard of Expression Web Designer over the years and dismissed it. In my opinion it is almost now more powerful than Front page. It is a cross between Front page and Dream weaver bringing the best of both to you making valid CSS very easy to construct. I love Microsoft Expression Web Designer because: Opening the program and using the new version of Expression Web Designer is usually fairly easy to adapt to. The interface is not un similar to Front page therefore users of Front page will feel right at home. The program is really helpful in designing CSS the way it has a type of live preview it interacts with the section you are working on. It shows what you are doing in simple language. I love Microsoft Expression Web Designer because: Good news and it is about time another nice fix Microsoft has done in Expression Web Designer is the template integration. We have all done it at one stage or another. Open a template in Front page from explorer without opening the site first and crashed Front page when you saved the template Thank you Microsoft. The support for asp, php, Java Script pages and more has also increased, including the help. Now days companies seem to have listened and implemented and as such made better help files. Remember those old help files useless bits of data or jargon puffed up to look helpful but it was not useful. This was even the case as little as 3 years ago. My overall opinion of Expression Web Designer is it is a much improved program outweighing anything on the market today. Barring a ridiculous price Expression Web Designer would be one program I would be more than happy to pay for. And yes I have tested plenty of programs over the past 26 years first testing for Microsoft in 1981 their Flight Simulator. ]]></description>
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