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Expression Web Designer just works...

I honestly thought this session (“Expression Web Designer” by Wayne Smith) wouldn’t be anything of great interest (because I was looking for WPF info vs designer stuff) but it has turned out to be pretty interesting. Microsoft is getting this application right. I probably wouldn’t use it because I’m not a designer and don’t too much care for messing with CSS, etc but for those doing it…seriously take a look at it. Hopefully the video of this session (and the others) will be provided soon. The cameras are over my shoulder and have been recording all of the sessions.

Let me give a few of the niceties that have been shown.

  1. CSS
    1. Copy some Lorem Ipsum (or whatever) to your page, highlight some text, and change the color of it (using the toolbar). A CSS class will be created and your P, Span, or whatever your text was included in will have a class assigned to it (ex - style1). Nothing special? Ok. Highlight some other text (anywhere on the page) and change it to the same color. The style created from the first color change (style1) will be assigned to the other text too. Special yet? Ok. Change the color of one of the currently changed text items to a completely different color. What happened? A new style was created, as expected. So you have style1 and style2 now. Change the text with style1 assigned to use the same color as style2. style1 will be removed and style2 will be assigned to the changed text. I don’t care what you say, that is nice. :-) It basically merged the styles because they are the same. Dreamweaver team…listen up. ;-)
    2. Font tags are not created.
    3. Table layouts are discourage, though still possible.
    4. Now this one is sweet. Select a div on your page then turn on Margins and Padding (if it isn’t on by default). This view shows you the padding/margins of your div. Nothing seriously new here…just a different visual implementation. Now, mouse over one of the lines and control click/drag. Your css class is updated with the new padding changes (which you can visually see changing/adjusting as you drag). Try shift click/drag and it will adjust your margins. All CSS changes to the class, etc assigned to that div.
  2. The Apply Styles panel is nice. It shows all of your styles (in page and css linked to the page). You can, of course, assign a style to text, etc by clicking on it and blah blah. What I saw that was nice is how you could drag the styles from your “in page” css group down to a stylesheet group and the styles are automatically added to your css. Nice huh? Now, CSS is “cascading” so you may want one style/class, etc below another. Just drag the styles around and you’re done. No cut/paste, etc in your CSS docs anymore.
  3. XML (he used an aspx here for the asp:XML control)
    1. With a div on an empty page, drag an XML file to the page. A table layout was created to display your data. Very nice. It is automatically done. You can look in your datasource panel and page through the different nodes of your document. This is obviously based on how well your XML is structured but for most cases, very nice.
    2. In that same page, drag an xsl file on top of the table and your table is updated automatically, in front of your eyes, to use the styles/setup in your xsl file. Again, very nice.

There were a few other things shown but the power of this app is in the CSS abilities. They aren’t doing anything overly innovative but they are doing things right/the way they should be done. It just works, as expected. This is just a beta version too. He didn’t show the newest build though. It is too early in the morning to mess with a nightly build. :-)

Of course integration with Visual Studio will be great as well. This will work like Interactive Designer/Visual Studio for WPF apps. Integration is nice.

The best part: FRONTPAGE IS BEING DISCONTINUED! :-) lol. Frontpage has a bad name now but I cut my teeth on it and am greatful for the View Code tab. :-) I am happy to know it is leaving though. They are going to have nice upgrade offers for Frontpage users and more marketing will go behind the product at the end of the year.

To clarify, Visual Studio is for developers and Expression Web Designer is for designers. The next release of VS will have some overlap with EWD but each will focus more on the main focus (designer vs developer) so the workflow can be nice for a single developer or developers and designers working together.

Ok…this has become a long post. :-) I’ll go ahead and let’er go but keep an eye out on this product. It seems interesting for designers.

Posted by John C. Bland II on September 22, 2006 9:39 AM |

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Comments


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Posted by: jlcsb kdgflcz | August 23, 2007 3:20 PM


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Posted by: jlcsb kdgflcz | August 23, 2007 3:23 PM


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Posted by: jlcsb kdgflcz | August 23, 2007 3:23 PM

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