MS recently released a suite of products under the Expression (Web, Blend, Media, Suite) name. It appears as if this suite of products is to go head-to-head with some of Adobe development tools (Dreamweaver, etc).
Yesterday I installed Expression Web, a Front-Page replacement and Dreamweaver competitor. Not being a fan of front-page I wasn’t holding out much hope for this little app but I must say within 30 minutes of using it I was extremely happy with it.
It’s a simple HTML editor, offering code and design views and aids the designer with a whole host of useful tricks to layout your designs in HTML quickly and standards based.
Using Visual Studio .Net for the last 4 years, I got sick of all the problems associated with using the designer mode for ASPX pages and instead always wrote my UI using declarative syntax (html, aspx).
Expression Web, offers a much improved simple interface for designing HTML/ASPX pages quickly and without any problems. The rendering engine is completely new and no longer the IE Trident engine.
That said, if I’m already working in Visual Studio 2005/Orcas I’m not really going to go open up Expression Web just to do my UI design. It really is meant for teams of developers that have a team dedicated to UI design.
