Microsoft Expression Web 2 review

Expression Web 2 also adds direct support for another completely new ActiveX control: Silverlight. This is Microsoft's cross-platform cross-browser answer to Flash and Silverlight authoring is the primary selling point of the new Expression Studio 2 suite.

Select Web 2's Insert Silverlight command and you are prompted to select the folder containing your Silverlight project and all the necessary support files are then copied to your current web site and supporting links added to the current page.

The light at the end of the tunnel?

In the future, integrated Silverlight support could well prove Expression Web's killer feature - but that's certainly not the case yet. To begin with, compared to the simplicity of adding Flash's SWF binaries, the process for adding Silverlight projects is awkward involving and multiple script files - and you can't even preview the file in Design view.

Moreover, as it stands, Silverlight just can't compete with Flash in terms of all-round power or all-important market share. There's one area where Silverlight 1 does offer some advantages - the delivery of web video. However, as Web 2 doesn't let you directly wrap video in a Silverlight player, this option is restricted to users of Expression Encoder.

Ultimately the potential of Silverlight to become a major web standard lies in the future - which makes Expression Web 2's extended support for other non-Microsoft standards even more important. Here the support for PHP, Photoshop and Flash is particularly significant and welcome. However, it's by no means a level playing field.

The FrontPage vision of the web as a Microsoft-only space has long gone but, as the restriction of AJAX to ASP.NET-based sites shows, Microsoft still favours its own technologies. If you do too, Expression Web 2 is the best choice available; if not, Dreamweaver still offers the widest and deepest web standard support.

Author: Tom Arah