Continue reading »]]> Many of you will have recently moved or will shortly be moving to Expression Web 3 for your web development, you will no doubt be aware of SuperPreview, one of the most talked about features of the software.  For those of you who don’t know, SuperPreview allows you to preview your pages as they would appear in many different browsers / browser versions, including side-by-side previewing.

One thing that didn’t make the cut this year though, as mentioned on the Expression team blog by Steven Schermerhorn, is the ability to view authenticated pages within your site out of the box.  Instead, when previewed, these authenticated pages will display what they would normally display to an unauthenticated user, which will probably be your standard ‘please log in’ screen.

Whilst the ability for SuperPreview to ‘log in’ to your page is not in this release, Steven does suggest a possible workaround in the form of configuring your web site for debug access.

You can read the full post including a more detailed description of the workaround here, and it sounds like we can expect to see this feature in the next version of SuperPreview.

Technorati Tags: Expression Web, expression web 3, superpreview

Continue reading »]]> Expression Web 3, part of Expression Studio from Microsoft has now been released and is available for purchase / download.

MSDN license holders should find Expression Studio including Expression Web 3 available for download now from the MSDN web site, whilst everyone else can take advantage of free trials (the Expression Web 3 trail can be downloaded here and is around 122mb) and upgrade offers, where appropriate.

Expression Web 3 brings some exciting stuff to the table to improve on the already popular Expression Web 2.

Amongst the most notable features are;

• Brand new look and feel to match the darker style seen in Expression Blend 2.

Image used taken from Expression Web site from Microsoft. Coptright Microsoft.

• SuperPreview – allowing you to view your pages / sites in multiples browsers and examine and resolve any cross browser compatibility issues with your designs.
• SnapShot Preview – A browser preview that automatically updates side by side with your design / code, meaning that you do not have to load the browser everytime you make a change to see what it will render like.
  

  Image used taken from Expression Studio Web Site from Microsoft. Copyright Microsoft.

• Silverlight and DeepZoom support – You can now embed Silverlight movies as well as DeepZoom movies into your pages using Expression Web 3.
• Improved FTP Publishing and Site Management – Expression Web 3 now claims to upload and sync your sites with your remote server faster than before, uploading multiple files at once.  It now also boasts improved site management which should make switching between sites and saving associated settings a breeze.
• Internet Explorer 8 Support – Support for IE8 now comes with EW3 allowing you to target web sites for this browser.
• Expression Design 3 Included – The graphical editor from Microsoft, Expression Design is now included with Expression Web.

Also released as part of Expression Studio 3 are the new versions of Expression Blend, Expression Encoder and,  as already mentioned, Expression Design.

I have only just installed the new version of the studio, but will post some follow ups of anything interesting I think would be worth sharing.

Below are some links to pages for Expression Web 3 and Expression Studio 3;

Expression 3 Web Site

Expression Web 3 Trial Download

Expression Web 3 Product Information

Let me know your thoughts on the new versions….

Technorati Tags: expression studio, Expression Web, expression web 3

Continue reading »]]> UPDATE: Expression Web 3, Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 have now been released, which you can read about in my post, “Expression Web 3 Released” here.

Scott Gu has just announced Expression Web 3 at Mix09 focussing on one feature in particular, SuperPreview.

SuperPreview finally allows you to test your web sites created with Expression Web on different platforms right from within the application itself.  SuperPreview supports IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Safari.

Even better than this, you can compare two browsers side by side or even use an overlay view to see any unwanted differences.

When you have identified a problem area you can even click on that area of the page to highlight that area of the DOM to assist you in fixing any cross-browser issues.

I am very excited about SuperPreview as it is something that has been desperately needed for a while.

The best thing though is that it is also available as a standalone tool and the beta is available right now from here.

Technorati Tags: Expression Web, expression web 3, superpreview

Continue reading »]]> UPDATE: Apparently, the Expression Studio is available, but you need to go to the Top MSDN Downloads page. Here is the link to the top downloads page. Plus it turns out that I clearly was not awake this morning when I made this post originally as the blog post I link to below is talking about Expression Web 1 and is from over a year ago! Doh!

I was very pleased to see that Expression Web 2 / Expression Studio was available on MSDN Downloads when I read this blog post this morning.

However, my mood was short lived as it appears that the newly Expression Studio, featuring Expression Web 2, is not available to MSDN Subscribers, with no clear date set as to if or when it will be.

I contacted MSDN Support via online chat and I was told that they had received other requests along the same lines and they simply said that a decision would be made and then the classic line of “Thank you for contacting MSDN today, is there anything else I can help you with?”.

There is some hope though, Expression Studio is now an option within the downloads menu, but alas this group is currently empty.  Lets hope the downloads are simply delayed and the listing is not a mistake altogether.

I for one hope gets this resolved soon and we can all download the goodness that is Expression Studio!

Technorati Tags: expression studio, Expression Web, MSDN

Continue reading »]]> The Expression Web Team have announced that CSS Sculptor for Expression Web has now been released.  Below is what they have to say;

We’re excited to announce that Eric Meyer (http://meyerweb.com/ and http://www.complexspiral.com/), internationally recognized authority on HTML, CSS, and web standards, and author of some of the essential books on CSS (as if you didn’t already know all that!), has released a pre-release version of his CSS Sculptor for Expression Web.

The CSS Sculptor for Expression Web helps you create custom web standards compliant, CSS-based layouts. Finally, you can confidently and resolutely abandon your antiquated table-based layouts and start churning out CSS layouts like nobody’s business!

I am going to download Sculptor this weekend (time-allowing!), so I will let you know what I think next week.  In the mean time, if you get a chance to have a look yourself, leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: CSS, Expression Web, Web Design

Continue reading »]]> UPDATE: This post was originally written for the Beta version of Expression Web 2. However, the content still applies to the full version that has now been released.

By now you have probably heard that the beta of version 2 of Microsoft’s web design tool Expression Web has just been released.  I am a big fan of Expression Web, having used it from the beta of version 1, and like many people I have been eagerly awaiting the release of version 2.  So, was it worth the wait?

Lets break down some of the new and updated features in Expression Web 2;

 PHP Support

If you develop using PHP (which I don’t), then the new version of Expression Web certainly delivers alot for you!  The app now supports PHP intellisense and syntax highlighting, which will likely bring all the PHP developers who liked the look of Expression Web 1, but not the lack of PHP support, into the community. 

But thats not all.  Expression Web 2 now supports the previewing of PHP sites locally, without the need for a seperately installed web server.  I know how much that features helps me all the time when I’m using Expression for creating ASP.Net sites and no doubt this will be the same for PHP developers.

ASP.Net & AJAX Controls

One of the biggest gripes I had (and I wasn’t alone) with Expression Web 1 was the lack of AJAX support.  When Expression Web was originally released, I automatically assumed that the standard AJAX controls (update panel, update progress, script manager etc.) would be available. Not so. This meant that I along with countless other developers and designers had to partially create our pages in Expression and then switch to Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer to work with AJAX.  Then, once you had these controls in your page, you recieved errors in design view in Expression becuase it didnt support the controls.

Luckily, the Expression Web team listened to the feedback and they have fixed this one too, and there is now full support for the standard ASP.Net Ajax controls to simply drag and drop them into your page.

Also, with regards to ASP.Net controls, you can now include custom controls in your web site, as well as a couple of new ASP.Net data controls, namely the ListView and DataPager control for when you are working with .Net 3.5.

Silverlight 1.0, Windows Media & Flash

You can now drop your Silverlight 1.0 applications straight into your site using Expression Web 2. Further to this, there is now support to also embed Windows Media and Flash into your site as well as Flash preview in design view!

Photoshop Support

Another new feature, which I know I am going to end up using all the time, is the newly added support for importing from photoshop.  Expression Web 2 will import any PSD (Photoshop) file and convert it to an optimised image file format for your site.  Not only that, but it has in-built support for photoshop layers, allowing you to decide to show or hide particular layers from the psd file.  Finally, once you have your optimised image, you can go back and edit it in photoshop from with Expression and it will update your picture in your site accordingly.

In Summary

Good job Microsoft!

Above are just four of the main new features that are part of the new Expression Web 2 Beta, a couple of the others which I won’t go into now are;

• Improved FTP Publishing
• Enhanced CSS styling and validation
• Byte Order Mark Options (one of the little niggles with the first Expression Web was the lack of support for BOM, leading to encoding errors, especially with applications like WordPress).

If you want to try Expression Web 2 Beta (I would definantely recommend it), go and download the beta here.

I would also suggest checking out the Expression Web Team Blog for news and updates regarding the app.

Technorati Tags: AJAX, ASP.Net, Expression Web, Web Design