Whats the difference between Expression Web 2.0 and Visual Web Developer 2008

[cudzich09]

Right now I'm starting to learn the basics of Visual Web Developer 2008, but I want to know what exactly Expression Web is for. Is it for designing templates in CSS or what? Can someone give me a brief explanation?


Thanks

 

[Markbnj]

I'm still figuring out the Expression product family myself. I have experience with Expression Blend, which is pretty much a WYSIWYG XAML editor with nice integration with Visual Studio. I think Expression Web is MS's Dreamweaver.

 

[imported_Dhaval00]

Expression * products are meant to produce [primarily] raw XAML files that can be later consumed into ASP.NET applications as modules. They are also supposed to expand when Silverlight 2.0 comes out [animations and the like] and both VS and E* will be complementary. I went to one of usability studies for MS, and basically the Expression * products along with Silverlight are meant to tackle Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash collectively.

At a higher level, it's just an extra tool at your disposal. The only major difference I have seen is the ease of producing raw XAML in Expression Studio as opposed to doing it manually via forms designer in VS2008. I guess it also depends on your knowledge of CSS and HTML. I usually tend to wade through the markup manually, and use the designers minimally (main reason being they don't render the end result accurately, especially when dealing with IE vs. FF issues) - so I can't comment on the differences in the designers.

Hope this helps.

 

[Markbnj]

I think the combination of Expression and Silverlight has the potential to be really powerful and give Flash a good run for it's money, if only because the technology stack is familiar to so many .Net programmers.

 

[imported_Dhaval00]

Ohhh... I'm already enthralled by some of the functionality in Silverlight 2.0. The technology preview showed Silverlight running on on a MAC, the engineer stepping into the debugger by attaching to the Safari process on a freaking MAC! I mean this could be just the start... imagine attaching to processes on the MAC. This will be a kick in cojones for Apple [if .NET gets official support from MS for being hosted on MACs]. Everyone was clapping. The real jolt was when they mentioned that Silverlight will be a mini-CLR hosted within the browser process and will be capable of calling out to the server to get DataSets and XML blobs. Sounds very exciting, indeed.