Microsoft Expression vs. Dreamweaver 222
An anonymous reader writes "Informit has a quick look at Microsoft's Expression suite consisting of Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer, and Web Designer in comparison to Dreamweaver. It seems that Microsoft got tired of relying on FrontPage and is actually going after professionals. From the article: 'What designers might not realize is that Microsoft finally drank the Kool-Aid. The Expression Web Designer application walks the Web standards walk. One caution: Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET. Microsoft built the ASP.NET platform; it isn't a surprise that Expression Web Designer was designed to support that platform. This is obviously a drawback for those designers who work with PHP, JSP, and other non-ASP.NET platforms, making it difficult for Microsoft to expand its reach beyond the ASP.NET users.'"
hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it really sounds like they're going after professionals. (rolleyes)
Difficult? For what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what this is designed to do is ensure that other Open (or even not so open) standards are used in decreasing frequency as MS pushes people to this package that's designed to work with their server platforms. After all, if you are running a MS web server on Windows Server 2### or XP Pro, designing pages with this is "ideal", so why spend the time using/learning/running PHP/JSP/etc when you have an all in one app to integrate it all for you?
My opinion is its another attempt by MS to leverage their market share (in installed servers) to gain a bigger foothold in other areas (ie: kill PHP/JSP/etc).
-Robert
So In Other Words (Score:5, Insightful)
So in other words, it's completely useless to many of us web developers, and isn't directly comparable with Dreamweaver? Thought so.
Re:Difficult? For what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So In Other Words (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, in other other words, it's another tool to put in your kit, that may be useful if you ever have to build or maintain an asp.net site.
Re:So In Other Words (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like this would be akin to having Adobe Swiss Army Knife and then going out and paying for Microsoft © Spork © ® XP © Pro Corporate Ultimate Extended EULA Edition.
Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't these two statements sort of, you know, contradictory?
Look, I know it's de rigeur for us to trash Microsoft and talk about "MS Fanboys" and all that - but even just reading this summary, it's obvious that 1) MS really HASN'T drank the Koolaid; and 2) This really isn't a professional tool by anyone's standards except some fanboys who don't know any better. It's just a repackaging of FrontPage - they're prettied it up and maybe added a few meaningless tweaks.
What's the old saying... you can put lipstick on a pig, but in the end it's still a pig.
What I would like to know is... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the code is clean enough I could run it on my Linux Apache server using mono.
Better not hold my breath...
Peh. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Standards Compliant Editor Useless Without IE F (Score:3, Insightful)
Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would any (sane) web application developer want to pay for and use a windows-only IDE, when you can develop on a free operating system, with free software, and do (virtually) anything you want with the source code??
As a perl/php web application developer, and someone who sometimes helps HR interview/test candidates to see where their technical skills and abilities are... I wouldn't recommend hiring someone who only uses IDE's such as dreamweaver, simply because they generally lack programming and software-design skills.
I might recommend them for a Web 'Designer' position, as they may be great at making graphical interfaces, but Web (GUI) Designers should not be confused with Web Application Developers, and in an assembly-line process they should never be exposed to the server-side source code.
Another drawback of using IDEs such as Dreamweaver in an assembly-line web application development environment, is that there is always a poor soul who has to clean-up all the nasty WYSIWYG-generated HTML code from the IDE. This is can sometimes be a huge set-back for resources and time allocation.
It's simply counter-productive.
Since most Web Designers who use IDEs only view from the 'Design' view, they generally don't realize how much sloppy code is being generated, or how to clean it up. (not all, but the majority of the mass)
It's about what, no how (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Standards Compliant Editor Useless Without IE F (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Other browsers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, rarely, rarely is it ever a MS, IIS, MSSQL,
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
And when they say that "Web Designer currently only supports ASP.NET", they only mean that if you want to do some kind of server-side development using Expression, it is going to be ASP.NET. You are perfectly free to develop XHTML/CSS/JavaScript to your heart's content. But what's that? Microsoft didn't include PHP/JSP/Rails support? Oh, nevermind. It's a toy for "fanboys". Sheesh.
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
My idea of a "dummy" is someone who doesn't use every advantage to get it done better, faster and cheaper because they fear they might be doing it the "soft" way. You can't live on programming "manliness".
If you think non-MS tools achieve that goal better, more power to you. But if those non-MS tools start looking "soft" someday, don't let that scare you from using them unless you find a more effective alternative.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
MS knows that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to fork over good money for a tool that is just adequate so that they can output content, applications, documents, etc., that is just adequate. That's where the real money is. It's not in producing the best product or service it's about appealing to the mass audience of neophites and apathetic designer/developers.
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Okay but what if (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it.
When people go to little blogs all day and see that some sites don't like IE, but then they go to their bank's website and it doesn't care... And they go to major news corporation sites and those sites don't care... And then they go car shopping and Ford's website doesn't care... do you get where I'm going with this? People are more likely to respect the opinion of major sites with millions of dollars invested in them (wellsfargo.com, etc.) than small company sites or blogs. The corporations aren't going to put out non-IE-compliant sites because IE has huge marketshare and corporations are more interested in customer-service than taking philosophical stands.
Personally I can't stand the "this site is better in browser X" notices because, in my opinion, a web designer's job is to design web pages that work for the majority of visitors. Too many "designers" forget that they are designing the pages for the visitors, not for themselves. As a visitor to a webpage, I don't care what browser the designer thinks I should be using, I just want the page to work. If I visit it in IE and the page breaks, I feel it is partly IE's fault for not making things easier for designers but also the designer's fault for not realizing that "going the extra mile" would've made the site experience better. Every site I design is designed to be standards compliant and then I include a few minor hacks to get IE to display correctly. I don't feel I've done my job properly until the site looks/operates nearly identical in IE (6 & 7), Firefox, Opera (8 & 9), and Safari. I don't have the time to test every browser known to man, but I figure those browsers cover the vast majority of visitors. Yes, it would be much easier to just code it to be standards-compliant and not give a shit about how it displays in various browsers, but that's not good design.
Re:So In Other Words (Score:3, Insightful)
> two futures: either Microsoft will buy them, or Microsoft will come out with a competing product
> and put them out of business. It's just crazy.
I get paid to develop software for Windows. I do this because ~everyone uses Windows. There are millions of applications out there, and probably tens of thousands of companies creating them; there's only a tiny chance that a fraction of those will be bought by or competed against by Microsoft. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
Professionals (Score:5, Insightful)
Professional, is a relative term.
So what if it's just for ASP.NET (Score:5, Insightful)
What I don't understand is why anyone would think they would do anything different? You may think the "right" way to make software like this is to target multiple platforms - but that doesn't make it the right way. Microsoft does not build software that way. Arguably they have proven that their way is more "right" - by the Heinlein test that it is the way that is most succesful. They've built a multinational corporate entity, producing software that runs the vast majority of the world's computing equipment, and they built this empire by writing software that was meant to work well together - and didn't really care how well it worked with other software.
They've made great strides in this area lately, showing a willingness to support alternative standards and open specifications, and even recognizing that interoperability is a value proposition to their customers - but I think it's idealistic dreaming at best to hope they would build a development tool for a competing platform.
I don't do PHP, Perl, CGI, J2EE or any of the "slashdot-approved" server-side scripting languages. I don't really care if my development environment supports any of them. I've tried them all, and had paying customers for most, and honestly prefer ASP.NET. I'm not trying to start an argument about which is better - merely stating my opinion. As such, Expressions is the perfect web designer for me, and I don't think anyone doing ASP.NET development would argue with that, if all you want to do in the world is ASP.NET development, then Expressions is clearly superior to any 3rd party tool - and no secret why, Microsoft has the expertise in their own API, and most likely a deeper understanding than is available in public documentation.
Gah (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a personal anecdote:
I was something like, maybe 16-17 when Frontpage came out. I tried it out, thought it was pretty cool.... except.. why doesn't that table justify properly? And, WTF is the deal with inconsistant fonts when I click the little button..?
So, fast forward five or six years, and now I'm a freelancer, doing all kinds of different stuff. About two years ago, I forgot to close my sunroof, and my carbon paper book that I'd used for invoicing basically melted into my passenger seat. Pretty, as you can imagine.
So, I said to myself, "I should really put together some kind of web-based thingamajig to take care of that shit for me."
Since I'm not a pro web guy, I muddled around with FP, Dreamweaver, Bluefish, etc. Fucking frustrating. Finally, I bit the bullet and spent about two months reading as much from w3schools.com and php.net as I could handle. For windows, I started using Crimson Editor (www.crimsoneditor.com) and Jed in Linux.
And, you know what? The *learning* was the real prize of that project-- and the top-notch custom built invoicing system was just icing. Yes, it took a long time, and yes, I did some dumb stuff (like the thousand-line nested if statement that a buddy rewrote to five lines). Yes, it's tedious to look up code examples and documentation. But, I know for a fact that had I been using tools like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and whatever else you might throw at something like this, it would never have gotten done, I'd still be using that damn carbon book, and I wouldn't have learned an entirely new set of skills to aid my business.
(Though, for the record, I wouldn't be a professional web designer if my life depended on it. I've had so many customers try to get those guys to do P = NP problems that it's lost its hilarity.)
PHP for Expression (Score:1, Insightful)
Outsourcing seems to have the same bottleneck. To outsource you must catch the Genie in the bottle and ship him overseas, and hope he works his magic in a foreign land. Problem there could be that that culture rejects it like the human body produces antibodies to fight off an infection. Some cultures are at various times in history are Xenophobic, if only at the government level. Only experiments however can tell, or test the waters.
It surprises me how marketing demonstrates time and time again the things we learn in kindergarten seem to attract customers, honesty, integrity, equality.. but when we grow up we're taught a variation of game theory at the business level.. do on to others before they do on to you.. and we're exporting that in many areas.
If we ignored game theory for a moment, it seems people always age and always retire, and at the edges, there is a real honest desire to train future replacements, and transfer the knowledge so that it doesn't get lost.. its not always the case.. sometimes something might replace the old technology-wise. But the real loss leads to reduced profits and expensive R&D all over again for the next generation. Imagine if Archimedes differential calculus had not been lost for 2000 years? What kind of profits could have come out of that?
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So In Other Words (Score:3, Insightful)
I've stopped being surprised at how little most intranet managers care about this. When a company's web server is using Microsoft servers anyway, and you don't have a choice about that, why shouldn't you use Microsoft's development software?
What's that you say? You have more experience with Dreamweaver, and you're already comfortable with that? Hmm. Too bad your employer doesn't have any copies of Dreamweaver in-house and they've already paid for Microsoft's dev software instead. Guess you'd better read up, or find another consulting position.