I’ll make this clear from the start: I’m really a Dreamweaver guy. But with all the posturing Microsoft has been doing on the web design/development against Adobe lately, I can’t help but be curious about what the Expression Web Designer can offer the web designer. Does MS Expression Web Designer have the goods to sway the Dreamweaver crowd?

I downloaded the beta version of MS Expression Web Designer (EWD) and installed it on my PC. Here are my impressions of this application:

The User Interface

• Once I got EWD up and running in WYSIWYG, I felt I was using MS Word. Its interface is very true to any MS application– front the look and feel to the interactions. As a Dreamweaver user, I’ve gotten used to its interface and I appreciate the difference in my use of DW and Word.
• EWD has extensive drag-and-drop features. You can insert form elements, html tags and visual components using that method. VB developers will probably like this but it may take some gettting used to if you’re a Dreamweaver designer.
• The Code View in Dreamweaver is superior in my opinion. The default code coloring in EWD is something I don’t like. However, the Intellisense feature in EWD is top-notch.

Using the Application

• The Help windows took forever to load.
• ASP.NET is the only server-side scripting langauge supported by EWD (Surprise!) So much for doing PHP/Ruby on Rails development.
• There are built-in ASP.NET components that can be inserted via drag-and-drop. Although Dreamweaver has some pre-built components, the use of drag and drop is a appeals to the lazy, ehem, smart coder in me.
• There is a thesaurus feature in the editor! I like this feature very much. Saves me time from switching from DW to Word when writing web copy.
• You will need a map to get to the Template feature.

Web Standards

• CSS is handled very well in EWD.This is one aspect that Dreamweaver guys will like.
• Style management is clean and efficient. Editing a style brings you to the code and panel view,so you can choose where to tweak your CSS.
• Formatting of components already is defined in to the webpage stylesheet by default. Nice.
• EWD puts a premium in the use of tables. It has a control pane exclusively for layout using tables. it even has a separate menu item for tables. The standardista in me just wants to scream.

Although I did try this application in its Beta phase, it’s pretty much sufficient. From Frontpage to this applications is a quantum leap on its own. However, I think Microsoft Expression Web Designer doesn’t not have what it takes to get Dreamweaver users to switch based on features alone.