When you install Expression Web v3 you may notice there is a new look to the install screen. No more daisy chain of people but instead a swirl of green. I must admit to liking the new graphic better.

This new color is repeated in the program icon which makes it easy to tell which version of Expression Web you have open, if as I recommend you keep Expression Web 2 installed side by side with Expression Web 3.

Did you notice that Expression Web is not just Web anymore but includes Expression Design and Expression Encoder? I haven't had a chance to really see what is new with Expression Design and Encoder (other than more output formats in Encoder 3) so I won't discuss them in this article. I'll stick to the area I know

Once Expression Web 3 is installed the new gray on black interface will tell you this isn't the same Expression Web you have been using. Like it or hate it black is the only interface color choice you have.

I must say that I am not a fan of the black interface and find it difficult to work with for any extended period of time, especially since I have other programs open on my desk that do not use a black interface so the constant switching makes my eyes very tired. However, I am told that many people do like black interfaces so I'll leave it at that I wish there were other interface options.

Best New Features in Expression Web 3

• Site Management
• New FTP Client
• SuperPreview
• Silverlight Video & DeepZoom support
• Source Control - TFS integration

The first thing I do when I open Expression Web is to open a local website, so I'll start from there.

Site Management Tools

Assuming you do the same you may be surprised to discover that Open Site and Publishing are no longer on the streamlined File Menu (image right).

All site management and publishing functions have been moved to the Site Menu (image left).

 Using the New Site option launches a dialog box familiar to Expression Web uses with one new addition, the option to add the site to the Managed List. I keep my local sites on my D drive in a folder named www. (I believe it is bad practice to keep the local working copy of the websites in my user profile, if you work on multiple sites it will make your computer very slow to load .)

New FTP Client

When you are ready to publish your site you will see new connection options:

Finally you will be able to use secure FTP either FTPS or SFTP and publish to Windows 2008 servers that have a | in the user name. No more slow publishing either now that the FTP client in Expression Web is multi-threaded. Expression Web 3 has a robust FTP client now. Score one for Expression Web 3.

SuperPreview

When you launch SuperPreview from Expression Web 3's file menu you will see more browser options that were available in the standalone beta. Now you have Firefox, IE 6, IE 8 and rendering using IE 7 compatibility mode in IE 8.

I opened the website for my first Expression Web book in SuperPreview in IE 6 and FF 3. You can see that there is a minor difference where the home link starts due to browser differences but in the thumbnail you can see that the differences are too minor to be worth feeing IE 6 different CSS.

Especially when IE 8 and Firefox all render the same as seen when using the overlap option.

Hopefully we'll see the ability to preview using Safari that Eric Saltwell demoed at MIX 09 before too much longer.

Silverlight

You can now encode Silverlight videos directly in Expression Web. Use Insert > Media > Silverlight Video then browse to the file you would like to encode.

Your video will be encoded and inserted in the page:

Source Control - TFS Integration

This is a feature that has long been wished for by those who work in teams of designers using Expression Web and developers using Visual Studio. I don't have Visual Studio Team Foundation System installed where I'm at right now so I can't test this out properly and give you screenshots. My understanding is that you have to create the TFS project in either Visual Studio or TFS Project Manager before you can open a project with source control in Expression Web.

Incremental Improvements and Bug Fixes

These are workflow improvements that are radically different but do make the program easier to use:

Auto Hide Panels (formerly called Task Panes)

While this isn't a revolutionary new something many people have been asking for since the first Expression Web beta, the ability to auto hide the side panels. All of the screenshots above used the default workspace layout with panels expanded. Below is the larger page workspace when you have the panels set to autohide.

Clicking on any panel will open it full height

Clicking back in the design or code surface will close the panel.

Image Previews

Yes, I can finally see image previews using Insert > Picture > From File inside of Expression Web 3. Granted this isn't a bug that hit everyone but in Expression Web 1 and 2 this is what I would see when I went to insert an image:

Browsing to the same folder with Expression Web 3 I see:

While I could always open a Windows Explorer window to check which file name matched the picture I wanted to insert being able to see the images is much, much better.

Help File

Okay, it still has too many references in the ASP.NET section to MSDN articles but it really is improved this version.

DWT = Dynamic Web Templates

While they didn't fix one of my pet peeves - naming the DWT master.dwt which causes all sorts of confusion with master pages (.master) you can now add a DWT or replace the DWT to multiple pages at one time. I held the control key down and selected three files from Folder List with my mouse. I then used Format > DWT > Attach DWT and selected the DWT to attach to the pages. After a brief warning message saying that any content above the html element would be lost all three pages had the dwt applied. I opened each file and verified that the dwt was indeed attached to the page.

I then repeated the process with three files that already had a DWT attached. This time I selected a different DWT (with the same editable region names to keep the test simple) from the browse to DWT dialog box. Again, all three updated with the new DWT and content stayed in the appropriate editable region.

One last test was to change an editable region name in the second DWT from sidebar to col1. After all three pages were updated to use col1 instead of sidebar I reattached them to the first DWT. I expected to be prompted what to do with the content in col1 but instead it migrated the content to sidebar. This is something that will bear more serious testing but is definitely interesting.

Contrast the new Expression Web 3 site menu with that in Expression Web v2.

You will notice that only Site Settings is on both and the version 2 Language tab has been replaced by a new Publishing Tab.

This change is one of the best features of Expression Web 3.

What's Not to Like?

Now that I've shown you the top five new/renewed features and some improvements to existing features now I'll talk about some of the things that I I don't like about Expression Web 3.

Customization

As I mentioned earlier you have no choice in the user interface (UI) color scheme but that isn't the only part of the UI that you cannot change to suit how you work. Normally in a Microsoft application when you right click on the menu bar you get a list of available menus with a link to customize your menus and toolbars at the bottom of the list.

In earlier versions of Expression Web there were many features that were only available if you customized the menus and/or toolbars. In this version if something isn't on one of the preconfigured menus or toolbars it isn't available.

This leads to a cluttered interface since it means that you must have multiple toolbars open in order to access features that I would have previously have simply created one toolbar with all of the items I commonly used and none of the ones that I don't.

Macros

Expression Web 3 no longer has the ability to create or run macros. This means that most, if not all Expression Add-ins you have will probably not work in Expression Web 3.

Conclusion

I am sure there are many more things that I should be addressing in this review but I haven't had as much time as I would like to use Expression Web 3 so I'll leave it here for now. One thing I will say is that I plan on keeping both v2 and v3 around for a long time.

Footnote

Microsoft says that there will be a Service Pack for Expression Web 3 that will restore some of the ability to customize the interface "Fall 2009".