Expression Web 3: what’s in it for ME?

When users evaluate a piece of software they often look at the user interface, the capabilities, how efficiently the software runs on their system, and a host of other criteria.  Regardless of what the individual user’s points of interest are, the end goal of the evaluation is to answer a simple question: What’s in it for me?

Expression Web 3 has a lot in it for a many different user types; from professional UI designers working as part of a team, to lone Webmasters working directly for their clients, and even hobbyists moving from FrontPage.

In this DZone article, we will focus on the higher level functionality and features most often desired by professional users who are often familiar with serious IDE environments like Visual Studio, Eclipse, and others.

What’s New in Expression Web 3

The latest version of Microsoft Expression Web is the third iteration of Microsoft Expression Studio’s Web authoring application.  Some of the notable new features include:

FTP

Publishing your site with FTP is faster than ever. Expression Web 3 automatically transfers several files at a time, instead of transferring them one by one, and it transfers them faster.  New publishing capabilities enable you to publish your files over a secure FTP connection, using FTPS or SFTP.  In the past designers and developers would often use the core application to work on their sites and pages and necessarily move to a dedicated FTP application for publishing.  That cumbersome workflow is no longer necessary as the FTP capabilities are on par or better than other stand-alone publishing applications.  The ability to handle publishing from within the application that you use to design and develop with is much more efficient, saves time and prevents headaches which tend to crop up when you’re forced to use multiple applications to do your work.  Expression Web 3 provides six different publishing methods:

• FTP
• SFTP
• FTPS
• HTTP (WebDAV and FrontPage Server Extensions)
• File System. 

Since this is a very important component of what makes Expression Web 3 so attractive to designers and developers see an expanded walk-through later in this article.

What’s in it for you:  speed, security, the efficiency of being able to stay within the design/development application and not having to launch third party applications for publishing.

SuperPreview

SuperPreview is a very unique application; it installs and integrates tightly with Expression Web 3.  With it, users can compare a page in multiple browsers simultaneously.  These browsers can be different versions of Internet Explorer,  or a combination of Internet Explorer and non-Microsoft browsers such as Firefox and so on.  The user can compare the browser rendering side by side or as “onion skin” layovers to help deduce which elements of their pages are matching up and which need to be addressed.  SuperPreview provides tools to sort through the Document Object Model (DOM) which helps to drill into certain areas of interest, highlighting both the display view and the code view.  If the user is debugging or verifying cross-browser compatibility with a dynamic page such as ASP.NET or PHP, SuperPreview comes into play after the page is seamlessly rendered by the Expression Development Server. 

What’s in it for you:  Speed, accuracy, and ease of cross browser compatibility modification or verification.

In the Snapshot panel, you can see how your page renders in the browser of your choice, right inside Expression Web. And, just like other panels, you can move it and dock it wherever you like on any monitor you’re using.  If you consider SuperPreview as a tool to use after you’ve done design/development work you can consider the Snapshot panel to be analogous to that, but which you’d use during your design/development work.  There’s no need to refresh the Snapshot panel as you save your page in the editor.  With each save, the Snapshot panel is refreshed and the page is re-rendered automatically.

As a designer, I usually work in Split View, but considering the work surface when using code view and the Snapshot panel, this is a great solution for some situations.

What’s in it for you:  Efficiency of previewing your page during the design and development process which will save you time and effort in debugging and cross-browser compatibility work at the end of the design process.

Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross–platform plug-in for delivering rich interactive applications for the web. Expression Web 3 enables users to easily add Silverlight applications to their pages from the Insert menu. Since Expression Encoder is now included with Expression Web a user can use it to convert video to Silverlight, choose a "skin" to customize how the video player appears, and add it to their page, all from the Insert menu.  This is a very powerful feature because the whole process takes place with little user input yet results in impressive and highly professional results.   

New Silverlight/Expression Web integration also includes adding Seadragon Ajax and Deep Zoom Composer images to their page in Expression Web from a composition created in Deep Zoom Composer.

What’s in it for you: Very high-end and highly efficient delivery of video and multi-media without jumping from application to application and without having to learn a whole new way to work.

Getting Expression Web 3

Expression Web 3 is available as part of the Expression Studio 3 suite of tools or as a stand-alone application. Expression Web 3 now includes SuperPreview, Expression Design 3, and Expression Encoder 3.

As a stand-alone application Expression Web 3 is available as an upgrade which requires a licensed copy any Microsoft Expression product, any Adobe Creative Suite product, Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or later, or a stand-alone “non-upgrade” purchase.

Expression Web 3 and all of the products in Expression Studio are available as 60 day trial downloads available here.

More generously though, Microsoft has seen fit to include Expression Studio (and other applications) free of charge to students through the DreamSpark Program, to Web Pros through the Website Spark Program and a number of other programs aimed at providing would be users with an economical entry point into the Microsoft IDE world.

What’s in it for you: free or very reasonably priced software that contains features not found in any other product.

User Interface 101

This latest version of Expression Web brings with it significant changes to the user interface.  Besides some menu item location changes, most of which have moved from the File menu on the Common toolbar to the Site menu, some significant UI changes also include the Snapshot Panel, and the Publishing Panel.  All of the user interface panels now have an auto-hide feature so that panels you don’t use all the time don’t waste your workspace real-estate.

What’s in it for you: The ability to customize your work surface to your liking depending on the job at hand.  Considering the variety of work that users do within Expression Web this is a big boost to user comfort level.

Keyboard Shortcuts

This following is an abbreviated sampling of keyboard shortcuts. 

Click here for a complete list.