Expression Web Blog

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Editionis provided free by Microsoft. So what about that is to do with free Expression Web? Well it uses the same engine that Expression Web does so much of features are available within VWD08EE with the added bonus of the ASP.NET features.

 The following features are not available within Visual Web Developer, now some of those you are not going to miss and can even substitute by using a free html editor or other third party tools.

1. Image tracing
2. Picture editing tools
3. Ability to draw tables
4. Layout table tools and task panes
5. Advanced, HTML-oriented Find and Replace
6. Spell checker
7. Quick Tag Editor
8. Behaviors
9. Frame-set editing
10. Image map tools
11. Previewing pages in predefined fixed sizes

The point is, Visual Web Developer 2008 is free for your usage and for those that can learn quickly but are on a lower budget this is an ideal stop gap to further your tool-set for web design. I also see it as an encouragement to learn ASP.Net by being in a familiar setting to Expression Web.

I told you previously about ReMix07 Boston - An ongoing conversation about Web Design in that post I mentioned Cheryl D. Wise my fellow MVP who is now a Microsoft MVP - Visual Developer - Expression. Cheryl was invited to talk at ReMix07 Boston and now the videos of her talks are available for viewing on Building CSS Based Websites with Expression Web

Ben Ramsey is an attendee at the Microsoft Web Development Summit 2007 on his blog he reports on the summit amongst his comments are some interesting points directly relevant to Expression Web and the next version. In particular the addition of features to implement PHP Syntax Support within Expression Web .

Wayne Smith a Expression Web Product Manager gave a demo at the Web Development Summit (N.B. Wayne’s demos are always good and not just because he’s British, it’s because he is passionate about what he does) where he talked about PHP features and implementation.

The comments Ben makes are not many but what PHP developers would like to see is a really a good showing with PHP.   They don’t need a full debugger or anything but they need enough where writing PHP scripts is fully supported. It definitely needs to become a major PHP IDE. Lets hope Microsoft will go all out on this front and not trickle features in over the coming versions going all out on the first update would mean that many PHP coders would sit up and take a keen interest in Expression Web and the more people using EW the more ideas are generated.

This week our Expression Web Interview is with Andrew Brisbane. Andrew develops FrontPage and Expression Web Addons to enhance our web mastering experiance. He is updating many of his FrontPage Addons to work in Expression Web. If you have a particular Expression Web Addon Wish let him know.

How to paste clean content from Word or other office products the quick way

Learn how to clean content complete with hyperlinks but no formatting from the document you just copied from into your Expression Web Page. Follow the methods outlined in the tutorial for an easy life.

By Tina Clarke Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved

This new tutorial is about Opening a web site live on the server using FTP with Expression Web and then publishing the site on the server back to the hard drive. There are three steps to each section with graphics to illustrate the points made in the tutorial.

This week our Expression Web Interview is with Dennis DeRobertis of Expression Extras Dennis makes a SEO Expression Web Addon which contains EXTRAS - of course. It is a must have addon in your seo campaign.