Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!

December 02, 2006 @ 4:12 pm- from Maui, Hawaii

Apparently Expression Web Designer will be going (or may already be) RTM soon. I’ve been using WD for quite a while and I’ve been very pleased with the visual designer and its overall functionality. It feels like FrontPage done right and it’s a worthwhile tool to have around when doing Web Development/Design – it seems a capable tool for complex layouts making it much easier than anything I’ve used before to build CSS based designs because of the way it manages the workflow of CSS based design.

So WD is going to release soon, but from what I gathered from various newsgroup postings it’s not going to be distributed through MSDN – so we have to buy it separately. I came down this path today actually because I hadn’t installed WD since installing Vista and Office 2007 RTM and I tried to download and install Web Designer Beta 1 which is what’s currently available for download. Alas, Beta 1 doesn’t work with Office 2007 RTM installed, so I headed over to the newsgroup and found out that it's about to ship and I'd have to wait. Thought I'd check to see if MSDN had anything newer, and nope - nothing. Web Designer will not on MSDN.

Not distributing Web Designer with MSDN seems like a boneheaded move for Microsoft. The last thing Microsoft needs in the design space is people second guessing this tool or make not available to developers. You’d think Microsoft would want to get as many people as possible starting to use this tool or try it, hopefully like it and recommend it and get the ball moving in weaning folks of Dreamweaver. That’ll never happen now… Developers are clearly not Microsoft's target for Web Designer, but many developers use tools outside of Visual Studio for their actual design - not everybody has a design team on their Web project. So a tool in this space very much applies to Microsoft Web developers. Most of the developer who are serious about design either hand code in the VS HTML editor (which works well enough), but the visual designer is a royal pain in almost all aspects. I use it purely to drop controls on a form and add properties, but for any sort of layout; forget it. WD provides an opportunity to use a better design tool in combination with VS.

Along the same lines I was a bit disappointed (in Beta 1 at least) that Microsoft didn’t try a little harder to improve ASP.NET compatibility in Web Designer. Basic .NET compatibility is there – WD knows about stock ASP.NET controls and can display and render them in place and provide Intellisense for them. However, it doesn’t work with any custom controls… how hard could it have been to provide that functionality which could have drastically improved the usability of WD in an ASP.NET environment. Without this it’s still usable but not a slam dunk… this seems awfully short sighted.

I suppose Microsoft is going after the graphics designer market, but that’s a real tough sell – the Adobe/Dreamweaver crowd is not going to switch unless a new tool is significantly better and while Web Designer is really nice it’s not drastically better than DW to make people who are already invested in the Macromedia platform switch. The best hope to make any sort of a dent is to get usage up from people who are indirectly involved with design – developers for example.

The MSDN absence also raises issues with the whole concept of MSDN which is supposed to provide copies of all development and business software (Premium). Surely Web Designer falls into this category – no less so than Office or FrontPage does. To exclude Web Designer seems just callous… what possibly could be the reason for excluding WD from MSDN in that respect?

To me it’s actually not the fact that I have to pay for it – it’ll be worth the FrontPage upgrade pricing, but the fact that buying it means waiting a bit longer and having to deal with physical media rather than MSDN downloadable software which is just very convenient when you’re doing frequent software installs as I do.

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# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by yaip December 02, 2006 @ 4:38 pm

Rick,

I too have played with WD but am a bit confused about its use with VS 2005. Can you please post a sample.

Thanks

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl December 02, 2006 @ 5:14 pm

You can't use it "with" Visual Studio per se. You just use VS.NET and whatever other designer you choose to use side by side. Instead of editing your code in the VS HTML Editors you use an external editor.

# DotNetSlackers: Expression Web Designer no MSDN for you!
by DotNetSlackers Latest ASP.NET News December 03, 2006 @ 12:01 am

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Steve December 03, 2006 @ 3:37 am

Designing web pages isn't for developers! <sarcasm>

Welcome to the world of MS this year - two steps forward, 3 steps back on just about everything!

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by David December 03, 2006 @ 1:00 pm

> Designing web pages isn't for developers! <sarcasm>
I couldn't say it better. I understand appealing to web designers, but EWD is a great tool for developers (such as myself). MS is really dropping the ball with no MSDN release. How do I explain to my boss I want to buy another MS product for Web development when we are already spending $$ for MSDN? I hope EWD by itself is not priced too high.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl December 03, 2006 @ 2:06 pm

List pricing looks like $99 for upgrades from FrontPage (not sure if an MSDN version applies - it does say ANY version of FrontPage) and $299 for the full version...

Upgrade:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000IBVVL8/westwindtechn-20

Full:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000IBZLA0/westwindtechn-20

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Graham December 04, 2006 @ 1:39 am

I read that the next version of Visual Studio (Orcas) is going to use the same design surface as WD, so it might not be necessary for developers to use it anyway. And if its in Visual Studio you'd think its going to have to support the rendering of custom controls

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Dusty December 04, 2006 @ 12:16 pm

I've been using the Expression Beta for some time now, and was also a bit disappointed by the ASP.NET support. One awesome new addition was the designer support for nested master pages (which ScottGu said would be included with Orcas), but other than that it's essentially useless. No custom controls is a deal breaker really.

I thought that maybe when the release version came out, this would have been fixed, but I just now downloaded the Trial version, and sadly the custom control situation remains the same.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Paul December 05, 2006 @ 8:21 am

Here is a list of some of the new feature we will see in the next version of Visual Studio with the code name “Orcas”:

Multiversioning, we can create project target different version of the framework, for example 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. The IDE and controls etc will be limited to the kind of feature we select.
Edit & Continue in web projects
Much better WYSIWYG
Better manipulation of CSS
In design view we can see anchoring lines like in Windows Forms today based on the styles on controls etc.
Make editing of server controls
Rendering and styles for controls will be more transparent (make it easier to control the markup)
New design surface called “Sapphire”
CSS property window
Nested masterpage support in the design view
Splitview, to both see the code and design in different windows at the same time.
New ListView control (is a new DataList with better markup support)
LinqToSqlDataSource (The name is not set yet), will make it easy for developer to use LINQ to get data and bind the data to a data-source control.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Thomas Jespersen December 06, 2006 @ 1:10 am

MSDN is for developers. And a real developer writes HTML and XAML in Notepad or Visual Studio's Code Editor, and does not needs Expression.

Expression is not for professionals and thus is categorized like Microsoft Works, Microsoft Money and therefore it is logical that it will not be part of MSDN!!!!!

/Thomas

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl December 06, 2006 @ 2:15 am

Thomas, now that you put it so succinctly - you're so right. How could i miss that???

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Peter Bromberg December 07, 2006 @ 11:17 am

Rick,
I looked for Expression on MSDN Subscriber too and didn't find it. I pretty much "got the message" that it wasn't gonna be there, either. And I agree its kind of a lame move, since we developers / MVPs/ etc. tend to promote the MS Products we like. It does seem like a promising product, I am a real developer and, no, I don't use Notepad to handle my layout and CSS. EditPlus, maybe...

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl December 07, 2006 @ 11:59 am

Well I like it well enough for my non-development HTML stuff that I bought an update <s>.

But it still irks me. It seems lately that Microsoft is really making some decisions that seem really questionable in terms of marketing and feature sets. The lack of better ASP.NET support really is a complete headscratcher - it couldn't have been hard to incorporate that given that ASP.NET controls can self render into HTML.

It's almost like they're trying to shoot themselves in the foot on purpose <g>...

In the meantime - there's a free trial that's good until March next year which is a fair amount of time. I still would encourage people to check it out - it's a worthwhile tool to have if you're doing any sort of HTML editing in general (even besides development).

http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Robbie Long December 09, 2006 @ 2:27 pm

I suspect the reason they're not including it is because it's still not as good as Dreamweaver at design. And with no special integration with ASP.Net or VS, it doesn't have any advantages there either. So, they don't want to distribute a whole bunch of copies which could result in a lot of messages poping up all over the web saying how badly it comapres to Dreamweaver.

If the people at Adobe where smart, now would be a great time to come out with version 8.1 of Dreamweaver and add tight integration with ASP.Net 2.0 and VS 2005.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl December 09, 2006 @ 4:02 pm

My guess is the last thing Adobe wants to do is to support Microsoft development tools at least in a way that it would be easy to use... <s>

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Paul Langan December 11, 2006 @ 5:16 am

I'll be sticking with dreamweaver to clean up the garbage that visual studio spews out then.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by David Ching December 11, 2006 @ 3:16 pm

MSDN subscriptions offer MS Office 2003 which had FrontPage in it. Expression Web replaces FrontPage. So why do they think now MSDN doesn't need to have it? The logic isn't there. But maybe the $ are, I don't know.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Jonathan Matcho December 21, 2006 @ 5:48 am

We've been using Expression Web for the development of our forthcoming Web site. It's a better tool than FrontPage, BUT it IS FrontPage -- just another version. This is evident in the menus as well as the meta tags generated.

As far as whether it should be included in the MSDN, I can see Microsoft's point with things like Publisher, Works, Money, Games, etc., but most users of those tools would consider HTML to be *programming*. In 2007, building Web sites remains technical stuff for technical people and FrontPage, er, Expression Web makes this no more of a technical challenge than before. It should be in the MSDN.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Mikhail Arkhipov December 22, 2006 @ 11:12 pm

Rick, actually, adding support for ASP.NET controls is hard. Yes, control does can render design time HTML, but that's pretty much it about the easy part. There is a lot more to it, like type disovery, type resolution, data environments, register directive management, toolbox support, property window support, etc, etc. Visual Studio has a lot of the code already in place since it can handle Windows Forms, has projects with reference management infrastructure, ships compilers that can provide a lot of data about the environment and so on.

Since Expression is not based on VS IDE, it cannot directly reuse VS services. My team (VS HTML editor and designer) helped to develop common code library for the ASP.NET support that is now shared between VS Orcas and Expression. However, as I said, some functionality was very difficult to make shared (too many dependencies on VS-specific services) and that scoped functionality to what you see in the Expression. I am sure this will be improved in the future releases. Besides, as far as I know, Expression support custom controls in GAC, but not in bin.

And Expression can be used together with VS, they complement each other well.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl December 23, 2006 @ 12:56 am

Hi Mikhail, thanks for the feedback. I really gotta wonder though - if you support GAC'd assemblies and controls, what's so different about bin\ directory assemblies? Sure assembly loading is different but the location is pretty much fixed in a Web Root BIN directory. Once you have an assembly to work from isn't the code the same?

FWIW, I didn't know about GAC'd assemblies working until recently - that's at least something, but doesn't help me much since most of the custom controls I use are not GAC'd.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Shawn Cicoria December 29, 2006 @ 5:56 pm

Simply amazed that we can't get this on MSDN downloads. I'm dumbfounded. We're provided Office - full suite.

This is another bonehead move on MSFT's part. My guess is they're trying to eek out another few $'s from customers. How can they forget that we paid so much for the MSDN Universal License (I even have Team Suite) and can't include a UI designer?

If they want uptake, feed it to the developers first. We're the greatest evangelists of their products.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Dustin Campbell January 11, 2007 @ 11:01 am

The most amazing thing to me is that, right now, there is an ad for Expression Web that shows up as the first item at msdn.microsoft.com. Apparently, it's good enough for MSDN but not for subscribers.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Michael Mortensen February 01, 2007 @ 12:47 am

I am - like yourself - stunned about this move from Microsoft.

For a quick and easy design setup i used to use Frontpage, and I looked forward to try the WD - but no luck here.

So I will just design ad-hoc instead, but I still believe this is a major setback for Microsoft (one to the collection).

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Ev February 08, 2007 @ 6:49 am

Hi Rick, I'm a LTRFTW. Thanks for the write-up. I was a graphic designer long before I became a microsoft developer (a trait I learned on the job along with SQL Development 7 years ago). I am now mostly an enterprise developer, but my favorite part of the job is still spent in Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

I will probably get the trial of Expression Web to see whether or not I want to switch to a new design application, but I have the feeling that it might be just as well for me to continue my Photoshop/Illustrator/Dreamweaver/Flash upgrades for my design work.

Maybe I should be real "hard core" and do my design on a Mac before sending the layouts to Visual Studio
;-)

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Jonathan Matcho March 04, 2007 @ 10:21 am

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is available through an MSDN subscription. As far as I can tell it has all of the features of the Microsoft Expression Web software along with some additional features for SharePoint sites.

So... not sure there's anything at all to be complaining about here.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Mike Berger March 17, 2007 @ 2:24 pm

I was just looked at the Subscription Product Keys which are available in my MSDN account and I found Expression Web under Volume License Keys at the end of the page.

Now I just have to find the Expression Web volume license media in the download page.

-Mike

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Expression Webber March 26, 2007 @ 6:58 am

As of 2007-03-15 Expression Web has been added to the MSDN.

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Rick Strahl March 26, 2007 @ 1:17 pm

Wow great news! I guess community feedback does get results on occasion (and no I don't mean just mine, but many others who have voiced the same sentiment).

# re: Expression Web Designer – no MSDN for you!
by Raj March 27, 2007 @ 2:58 pm

Which subscription do you guys have. With MSDN VL Visual Studio Team Suite, I am unable to find Expression Web. Am I missing something or is there a higher level subscription?

# Expression Web er nu RTM... men! - Thomas Jespersen's weblog
by Thomas Jespersen's weblog July 04, 2007 @ 2:32 am

dotnetforum.dk er et dansk .NET community som har tilformål at fremme .NET platformen i danmark.

# Robert McLaws: Windows Vista Edition : Apparently Web Developers Don't Do Web Design
by Robert McLaws: Windows Vista Edition July 17, 2007 @ 8:35 pm

Or so Microsoft says. When I read on ActiveWin that Microsoft wasn't going to be including Expression Web on MSDN , I was shocked. Microsoft is notoriously in-tune with its developers, and is usually very good to them. So I pinged my friend Brian Goldfarb