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microsoft expression web vs adobe dreamweaver
Julie Smyth : July 2007

Cyber Aspect PublishingFollowing on from last month's look at Adobe post-merger is our look at what's happening with the Battle of the Giants. Microsoft have come out batting in an all-out war against Adobe's Dreamweaver. Their new product Expression Web is directly targetted at Dreamweaver users in the hope that the majority will be swayed to the tune of this new kid on the block.

I'm happy that Microsoft is going to keep Adobe honest because competition in the market-place gives us product choice and usually better features. And, let's face it, Adobe have a pretty unfair advantage here, having acquired their only serious competition when they bought Macromedia and welcomed Dreamweaver into their product stable with arms outstretched.

As we know Dreamweaver has been the tool-of-choice for web developers for quite a few years now, so are Microsoft biting off more than they can chew with their market-share push? After all, won't there be a lot of developers pre-disposed to Dreamweaver and very reluctant to learn a new set of skills if they were to switch to Expression Web? And, then there's another prejudice, Front Page, Microsoft's only offering in the web development stakes, which was never accepted or for that matter taken seriously by the developer community at large.

The answer for Microsoft could lie in the fact that alot of the Expression "team" is made up of ex- Macromedia and Adobe employees and their inside knowledge could make Expression Web a force to be reckoned with.

I've yet to review Dreamweaver CS3, the first release since the Macromedia merger, however, it is supposed to be much more CSS-centric than previous versions and contain more support for Server Side scripting languages. But it wasn't built to do this from the outset and has had more and more features added to it over time. It's a great tool but perhaps could be better if it wasn't trying to cater to all things web. On the plus side, it's integration with Photoshop, Flash, FireWorks etc. is a pretty strong reason to stick with this product.

I haven't reviewed Expression Web either but Microsoft have stated that there won't be any more Front Page releases and Expression Web is not just Front Page with a new name but a completely new product with loads of features and support for ASP.NET. A little alarm bell sounded when I read this, as Microsoft built ASP.NET and I'm presuming Expression Web will be the ASP.NET engine, or rather tool of choice for ASP.NET developers. So, this means developers using ASP VBScript probably won't make the switch to Microsoft and it's unclear why Microsoft would so willingly limit their target market, unless they're planning world wide dominance of ASP.NET over the other languages. Or, was their rush to release the reason and will later versions include support for other languages? It appears that some nice Microsoft features abound in Expression Web, like red underlining of errors (ala Word). And, then there is the rest of the Expression Studio, which includes Photoshop and Flash look-a-likes and similar integration within the Studio.

Another plus for Microsoft is that Expression Web supports CSS and Web 2.0 technologies, perhaps even better than Adobe Dreamweaver does. Expression Web includes reporting for accessibility, browser comparability, broken links and style sheets which seem to include more detail than the Dreamweaver ones.

To me it looks like Microsoft are taking a gamble, a big gamble. The answer? Well, I guess, only time will tell.
 
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