Ah damn. After installing the Office Beta 2 Refresh a couple of days ago the Sharepoint Designer (aka. Expression Web Designer) no longer works. That really bites since I really have been very fond of this editor to this point.

So I headed over and downloaded Expression Web Designer Beta 1 and it seems to be running fine. This updates (since the original Office beta) seems more polished and smoother, although there are still a few weird issues that I wish they would take care of.

ASP.NET Support works mostly

It looks like ASP.NET 2.0 support is also much better at this point. I was able to open up a few fairly complex ASP.NET pages with master pages and themes enabled and Web designer is rendering them correctly. I can even highlight controls and get a property editor. The Toolbox also includes just about all of the standard ASP.NET controls and you can drag and drop them onto the designer surface.

Intellisense works in the designer as well so the designer is picking up all control properties and you can use code editing to enter your control definitions. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to tell it to find custom controls. Most of my base controls are subclassed and all of them show up as generic grey boxes. The previous version had some mechanism for adding assemblies that Designer knows about (although that didn’t work and tended to crash the designer <s>) but I can no longer find this option and it surely isn’t automatically picking the assemblies out of the bin directory. I really hope this gets resolved because it would be really kick ass if we could use Web Designer for primary layout instead of the clunky VS.NET designer.

Oddly the code editor sees the controls so when I type <ww: I get intellisense on all the controls that are loaded into the page with my custom control assembly. This makes me wonder if this is not related to where the designer is getting its rendered output from. A control designer? Control.Render()? Either way it should work with the stock control subclasses since the designers and rendering are inherited.

Overall though, this is looking pretty exciting. And from the sound of it, there’s talk that the expression editor will make it into the next version of Visual Studio as the primary WYSIWYG editor!!!

Now to convince Microsoft to package the editor as a reusable component so we can plug it into our own applications to get a reliable HTML editing interface instead of the piece of crap editing features of the Web Browser control. Don’t get me started <s>…

CSS Design that works

I really like Expression Web Designer’s operation, the way it works and feels and especially that it seems to create actually worthwhile CSS compliant HTML or XHTML even in WYSIWYG mode, so I am stoked on what is clearly the most important feature. I know many people look down on WYSIWYG editors but this thing might actually change your mind. Two things that are important for WYSIWYG editors: That’s it’s a fairly good representation of what you will get in the browser and that it generates clean HTML and Web Designer does both. The visual editor also has very useful boxing hints that shows you in the live document the active box element you’re working on allowing you to select it and then edit the tag or the related styles. It’s all very well thought out IMHO. From an editor and HTML code perspective this tool definitely gets it right…

Now if it could only fix all my old and non-compliant HTML I have floating around on my site automatically <g>.

Web to Directory mapping still sucks

One that bugs me the most is the lack of support for file based Webs that understand the concept of a Web site. If you have links in your site like /images/image.gif or /westwind.css Web Designer chokes and can’t find these references because it doesn’t recognize the root directory opened as the ‘root web’.

I’ve not been able to open a local Web site directly (ie. http://localhost/) – designer complains that there are no FrontPage extensions. No shit Sherlock, because you didn’t install them. Not that I’d want them but there was no option for them either. It seems to me that the designer is smart enough to sniff my local IIS to tell me what sites and virtuals are available (it’s showing them in the ‘open web dialogs’) but it can’t translate the directory mapping to a Web site.

This is more an annoyance than anything, but this should really be addressed, because this would pretty much eliminate the need to use FP extensions altogether. Heck, I don’t even know how you would install the frontpage extensions at this point. Under Vista there aren’t even IIS options for it anymore…

The navigator and easy publishing features also are great and makes it a snap to manage the many pages I deal with on my Web site effectively. But in many of the behind the scenes details are still carrying over all the things that were wrong with FrontPage.

Lots of little things like not being able to save ASP files in some situations (the tool complains about a newer file with an older date <g>). Used to have that in FP all the time. Like there not being a ‘Publish’ feature on the current page context menu – instead you have to use the navigator to find the file and the publish. This is made worse by the fact that the navigator tends to go off into space after you’ve selected a page and you have to drill down the tree again and again to find the page AGAIN.

Expression Designer or Sharepoint Designer

So, on the surface at least Office Sharepoint Designer and Expression Web Designer seem pretty similar. I think there are some differences especially in regards to sharepoint specific features, but I couldn’t tell you what they are. I did a quick search to find a comparison what’s different between them and came up with nada.

I would prefer that Microsoft focuses on getting the editor portion right rather than branching off and adding more stuff on. The core engine is really what drives this tool and so far I think for once it’s pretty impressive. After years of FrontPage’s horrible HTML layout this tool is a big step up.