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Microsoft Expression Web Designer

By Chris Mendla, October 2006

Microsoft is in the process of phasing out its FrontPage product line.  The upgrade path if you're staying with Microsoft and do not need a Share Point services, is to migrate to Expression Web Designer. 

This product will not use the ubiquitous FrontPage extensions .  much of the functionality that was provided by the front page extensions and webbots will now be provided by ASP.NET. 

The main concern for developers who are using FrontPage and hosting on Unix/Linux space systems is whether not they will be able to easily create navigation structures the way they were able to in FrontPage .  Much of what is been written so far about expression web designer indicates that you do not need a asp.net. from what we've seen so far, this isn't entirely true .  It appears that you would be able to create web sites without asp.net.  However these sites would have limited functionality .  For example you would need to create all of your navigation structures by hand .  For all but the small sites this would be incredibly tedious.

One solution would be to simply migrate all of your sites two windows based hosting.  There are a number of reasons that many webmasters would not wish to do this. 

It does appear that there may be a solution.  There is a project known as MONO (http://www.mono-project.com) that will allow asp.net to run on Unix and linux based systems.  The problem as of October, 2006 is that motto will apparently only run version one of asp.net whereas expression web will require the functionality of version two.    

The important thing for webmasters to determine now is (1) how long you're hosting company will continue to support frontpage extensions and (2) will Mono or a similar project have the needed functionality and be deployed at your hosting company . 

First impressions:

a beta version of expressions wed is available for download for a limited time from Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx   You need to install .NET Framework Version 2.0 before installing expressions web.  There are some issues when you have been versions of other products such as office 2007 installed.  The combined download is about 200MB. 

Those designers running older machines will need to seriously  think about upgrading their hardware. 

The interface looks very similar to that of FrontPage 2003.  However there are many changes in the underlying functionality and the way you will need to approach things.  For example from page standards such as share borders will need to be handled a little differently. 

There is an import feature that seems to be able to import existing FrontPage webs.   When we tried it, FrontPage components such as the navigation bars were visible and could be edited.  However it does not appear to be possible to create new navigation bars, although you could probably copy and existing NAV bar. 

There will be, in our estimation, a fairly steep learning curve for those transitioning from FrontPage two expression web designer

 (we will be updating this page as more information becomes available and as we test the product further)

Last modified:  11/10/06