VERDICT Microsoft widens its support for web standards to include PHP, AJAX and Flash, but its primary focus remains on its own technologies: ASP.NET and now Silverlight.
The mission for the first release of Expression Web was clear: to lay the ghost of Microsoft’s unpopular FrontPage web authoring package. It largely succeeded by concentrating on providing standards-compliant support for the web’s core markup languages, (X)HTML and CSS. Apart from minor tweaks, such as the ability to automatically alphabeticize HTML properties, the handling of these two pillars is left unchanged and Expression Web 2 now seeks to widen its standards support.

Microsoft pulls off an extraordinary feat reinventing desktop application design, but it's only the taste of things to come regarding the web.

For years now there has been talk of Microsoft’s determination to move into the design software territory normally associated with Adobe. Now, with the launch of the Expression Studio suite, the talk is over – so how does it shape up?

With GoLive all-but gone, it might seem that Dreamweaver now holds a monopoly over professional page-based web authoring.

However there’s still one company with the resources, vision and resolve necessary to mount a serious challenge to Adobe, and Microsoft is absolutely determined to do just that.

VERDICT Microsoft finally recognizes that professional web authoring needs a standards-compliant tool – just so long as they are Microsoft-approved standards.

Both the Web and Microsoft are central to modern computing but FrontPage, Microsoft’s longstanding web authoring application, is generally viewed with contempt. Microsoft has finally bitten the bullet, killing off FrontPage and replacing it with a complete rewrite: Expression Web.

Tom Arah looks at Microsoft’s upcoming Expression Studio and its underlying WPF and XAML-based strategy.

Key to understanding Microsoft's future plans is an appreciation of Windows Vista’s new presentation subsystem, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)...