Since I was one of the people bitching about Microsoft not releasing Expression Web a while back I am glad to see that Microsoft has decided to now offer these products on MSDN. Kudos for listening to the community on this issue.

I've been using Expression Web for quite a while for my non coding html and site management and I like it ton. In fact I bought a copy as soon as it became available and it was worth the price of admission especially as an upgrade to FrontPage.

But the big reason for my bitching wasn't about the $100 or so to shell out, but rather the perception and the need to get a tool like this into the hands of as many people as possible so that they can spread the product out into the world. Microsoft is targeting these products at Designers primarily but the reality is that most of the people who will be using them at least at the start are going to be developers who need richer tools for editing. Let it spread out from there. Expression Web is a fine product although it could use  a few more bug fixes and better developer friendly functionality, but for a 1.x product from Microsoft it's pretty damn good. I just hope that Microsoft can keep Expression Web and the Visual Studio Editor in some sort of sync so that some of the developer centric features can bubble back up into the standalone product as well...

I've also used Blend over the last week or so and it's come a long way from the early previews. It's quite nice as well, although I find it difficult to work with, especially after having played around with Aurora which is kind of similar but just feels much more intuitive than Blend. Most of this is probably my ineptitude with dealing with such a graphics centric design metaphor. I have to say that I'm really struggling with concepts like this and Blend isn't doing much in the way of helping me out. But that's not Blend's fault, but * cough * mine...

Anyway, I think this was a smart decision by Microsoft. If you haven't looked at Expression Web now there's no excuse  not to check it out...