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A Train or a Beast

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Expression Web is Microsoft's latest web design tool. It should be no surprise to you that we put a lot of effort into making sure that Expression Web supported the design-time elements of ASP.NET 2.0. Doing so has proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ASP.NET developers who have been frustrated by Visual Studio's lackluster designer are excited to have a standards-compliant design tool that supports ASP.NET in the designer. On the other hand, web designers who don't bring a vested interest in ASP.NET to the table quickly begin to feel that something's missing. That "something" is support for writing ASP.NET server-side code, support for using 3rd party controls in the toolbox, etc.

The next version of Visual Studio (code-named "Orcas") will use the designer from Expression Web, so ASP.NET developers will have great new tools inside of Visual Studio. See my earlier post for more information.

When the ramblings of discontent first began over the limited ASP.NET support in Expression Web, I was clinging to the mantra of "designer vs. developer." Expression Web is, after all, a design tool. Therefore, it only makes sense that its development features would be limited. As time has gone by, I've found myself deviating from that position, and it's my love for ASP.NET that is pushing me off of my post.

Expression Web is being adopted (or at least looked at) by a huge number of FrontPage users who are reacting to the warnings that FrontPage is going away. The exodus of FrontPage users is placing a huge number of people smack in front of the ASP.NET train and we have two options available; squash them like pennies or invite them onboard. Unfortunately, the partial implementation of ASP.NET support in Expression Web is turning these early adopters into slivers of copper. (Okay, enough of that analogy.)

Let's be fair. Expression Web is a version 1 product, and features are usually still being fleshed out when version 1 products release. Even so, I think we've missed a real opportunity. One of our shortcomings at Microsoft is that we often don't see the lions chasing us until we feel the warm breath on our neck. In this case, the lion is PHP (coupled with MySQL), and because it's not burdened by a reliance on any particular platform, the lion is flat-out fast. Personally, I think ASP.NET is a much better technology (there's no doubt about it being more feature-rich) and Visual Web Developer makes using ASP.NET easy and cost effective. Even so, many web designers are already using PHP and our goal should be to take very opportunity to move them to a better beast.

What's my point? Primarily, it's to let folks outside of Microsoft know that we do think about such things. After all, you can bet that if an ASP.NET escalation engineer like myself is mulling this over, the product group is way farther down the track. (Geez, there I go with the train analogy again even after I promised to stop. Sorry.) I think that future versions of Expression Web will beef up this feature-set. The release of the next Visual Studio version will also change the landscape because it will be accompanied by a new (and free) release of Visual Web Developer Express and it offers many of the enticing features of Expression Web without any limitations on ASP.NET development.

One thing's for sure; it's a great time to be a web developer!

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