Review – Microsoft Expression Web 3

Posted by mdrisser on 2009/09/29 under Design, Development, Web Browsers | Be the First to Comment

As part of the WebsiteSpark initiative from Microsoft, which I talked about last time, you receive a licensed copy of Microsoft Expression Web. There are 4 parts to the Expression Web Family:

Expression Blend
Expression Design
Expression Encoder
Expression Web

I’ve taken a little time to play around with them, so I’ll share with you my impressions.

Overview

“Microsoft® Expression® Studio opens up a new world of creative possibility. Its professional design tools give you the freedom to make your vision real—whether you’re designing for standards-based Web sites, rich desktop experiences, or Silverlight.”

Microsoft Expression Web

“Expression Web makes creating compliant standards-based Web sites faster and easier. With a state-of-the-art design surface that generates clean CSS, you can make design decisions on the fly, knowing that you’re seeing a faithful representation of the final browser-rendered page.” — Microsoft Expression Web Site

Expression Web is a web page editor similar in concept to Adobe Dreamweaver. Giving you ‘Code’, ‘Design’ and ‘Split’ views of pages, code completion (InteliSense), ‘Preview in Browser’, a built in CSS Editor, support for ASP.NET and PHP and much more. If you like Dreamweaver, Expression Web is a good alternative.

Like Dreamweaver, you can setup sites to easily keep your web sites organized. While not as flexible or as powerful as the Dreamweaver equivalent, it’s a useful feature.

The Toolbox is another nice feature, allowing you to drag and drop a limited set of HTML tags, most form elements, and ASP Controls into your page, either in Design or Code view.

There is provision for inspecting your tags and CSS properties, as well as applied styles, style creation and style management.

All in all Expression Web is a capable web page editor, while it lacks many of the features and abilities of Dreamweaver, it still offers the beginning web designer or developer a useful tool.

Microsoft Expression Web Superpreview

In my opinion, this is the best tool in the group by far. Superpreview allows you to see your page in two separate browsers at once, making it super simple to compare how the browsers render your page.

You start out by selecting the two browsers you want to view your page in, enter the address and away you go.

Any action you perform in one browser is mirrored in the other. Scroll up, down, left or right in one browser and the other browser does the same. Inspect an element in one browser and see the results in the other browser as well.

The one drawback is that your nifty interactions won’t work, no mouse overs, no animations, no dropdown menus, etc. But for layout work, this is a great tool.

Microsoft Expression Design

“Expression Design is a professional design tool for creating graphics content that can be used within the authoring applications in Expression Studio: Expression Blend and Expression Web.” — Microsoft Expression Web Site

Expression Design is a simple image editor. Pretty basic in its capabilities its two biggest drawbacks are the inability to rotate objects other than 90 degrees, and the lack of a crop function.

Expression Design does however give you the ability to import Illustrator and Photoshop files as well as exporting for Silverlight. Which makes it useful for converting images to native Silverlight format.

You can use and edit gradients, draw shapes, draw text, fill with an image, work with layers and more, but if you’re looking for a serious image editor, there are other options.

Summary

I haven’t yet tried Expression Blend or Expression Encoder, so I can’t really say anything about them.

Expression Studio is an integrated solution for designing and developing for Microsoft technologies (e.g. ASP.NET and Silverlight). The tools work well together. If you’re new to web design and/or development, or want to learn Microsoft technologies, these tools are a good choice, but for heavy lifting, especially image editing, there are other tools available.