Microsoft Expression

Expression Web Designer

Another area where Microsoft is looking to boost its design credentials is the web. Its current offering, FrontPage, has changed radically in recent years, but its original poor support for standards means it will never gain professional acceptance compared to the likes of GoLive or, particularly, Dreamweaver. But Expression Web Designer already looks like a much more serious contender.

By keeping the underlying code of a web page exposed, it's a major progression from FrontPage, which did its best to keep it hidden. While Expression Web Designer is built around a main wysiwyg-layout window, it also offers tabbed access to code and split code/design views, and is bordered by technical task panes reminiscent of an advanced programming environment. It's much more serious and professional than FrontPage, but usability hasn't been forgotten - the latest CTP can already show Dreamweaver a thing or two about efficiency and productivity.

Ultimately, though, it's the quality and browser compatibility of the outputted code that will determine its professional acceptance and whether the ghost of FrontPage can be laid to rest. Here, Microsoft is making all the right noises about standards compliance and, crucially, each page can be based on a doctype, to which all code will then conform. You can also set a secondary schema for the compatibility checker so that otherwise correct code which isn't supported, say in IE6 or IE5, is flagged.

By default, Expression Web Designer outputs XHTML 1 Transitional code, cutting out much of the complication associated with formatting tags. Instead, the XHTML is styled with CSS (cascading style sheets), for which the support looks exemplary. With dedicated task panes for applying styles, as well as a CSS Properties pane, you can see just what rules are feeding into the current formatting and edit them accordingly.

Ultimately, it's XHTML/CSS code presented to the web browser to display, but for scalable sites with rapidly changing content it's important to ensure that each page and page element can be swiftly designed and coded. Particularly useful here is the ability to process XML-based data sources, such as live RSS feeds. Expression Web Designer makes this task as simple as possible by taking care of the XSL Transformations behind the scenes, while the end user can simply drag and drop elements from the Data View task pane.

For server-based processing of data, Expression Web Designer offers strong handling of Microsoft's own ASP.NET 2 standard, including drag-and-drop access to controls, support for nested master pages, full compatibility with Visual Studio 2005 and a built-in Development Server that lets you preview your site locally. This goes a long way to making advanced dynamic web applications as simple to create as static pages; it may also drive the take-up of ASP.NET 2 itself. It's an impressive showing, but if you want to use other server languages (JSP, PHP, ColdFusion or even older versions of ASP) there's currently no support for them.

While Microsoft's conversion to standards remains in question, the streamlined power of Web Designer means that, in certain areas at least, Dreamweaver may finally be facing some real competition.

Expression Interactive Designer

Although it's the smallest download at just over 6MB for the installer, Interactive Designer is the application on which Microsoft is pinning many of its hopes for the development of application GUIs that move on from XP. It wants WinFX/WPF everywhere, and Interactive Designer is certainly the fastest way to achieve that.