Thread

Microsoft has released a beta for Expression Web 2 Beta, that is free to run till July ‘08.
It’s a huge download of 200meg or so and takes 750meg or more disk space. It supports PHP now, that’s a big switch in the MS camp.
I know there were a few fans of the editor around here, it’s great for CSS.

Check it out if you must:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=web2beta
Just installed it here, no feedback except it didn’t break anything yet.

Why oh why such a bloated download? I’m not a Microsoft opponent (I work on Vista PC’s) but 200 Mb is more then the Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 version (which is the ninth official release, so by far not a beta). And I tend to think of Dreamweaver as bloatware as well.

Before I try it on a secondary system, does it not want to spam you with all kinds of unwanted stuff?

no feedback except it didn’t break anything yet.

It will!! 😉

Not really being a php coder, I’m not going to be a good judge of the PHP intellisense, PHP code editing.
I kind of figured some sort of PHP server would be built into it like any IDE.
They didn’t bundle Apache or anything, which is probably fine, as any PHP dev’er would already have installed all of that.

I did try pasting an EE coded template I had in there, and beings the page wasn’t set to UTF-8, mistake on my part it added some character encodings that sort of messed things up, maybe I’ll try that again.
When you install the program the default settings are not to participate in the feedback, etc. or be signed up for any newsletters, but it did ask, and have check boxes. Also I have Expression Web 1, this installs in a new directory so as not to mess up with any templates from the other paid version 1.

@Mark thanks for your confidence 😉
I’ld like to be able to paste EE template code in there if only for the proper code indentations, and I saw your recommendations on that in another thread on that topic. I’m forgetting exactly what you recommended something about a publish page improvements, do you have that installed and working in EE 1.6.2? The thread also mentioned firefox tabinta (grabbed that, works great).

Expression Web has a right-click reformat html feature that sets code indents across the page, it’s one of those things to be careful with, that could break EE code, I’m gonna guess, but wanted to see anyways.
[edit:]
It turned this:
  <div id=“content”>
      {embed="bees_inc/.logo_title"}
      {embed="bees_inc/.main_nav"}
      {embed="bees_inc/.search_section_intros"}

Into this, using the reformat feature (so forget that):

<div id="content">
    {embed="bees_inc/.logo_title"} {embed="bees_inc/.main_nav"} {embed="bees_inc/.search_section_intros"}
    <div id="maincontent">
        <div id="right_side">
            {embed="bees_inc/.latest_news"} {embed="bees_inc/.latest_products"}
        </div>

There may be a setting to correct overwriting of the ” when using reformat html, I can’t find one though. Maybe it will even be fine for when we are all digging into CI code at some later date, but it doesn’t appear to have much use for EE templates, that’s my review and I’m sticking to it.
I was liking Aptana Studio otherwise.

Thanks for the update, allways good to know what’s available