Tell us what you think!

Question

Got feedback about Expression Studio?  We're listening.  Tell us here what you're thinking about.


Renee Yong, the Product Manager for the US Subsidiary for Microsoft Expression is particularly interested in hearing your feedback: 

"I’m super open to ANY feedback about Expression – technical and non technical.  I'd love to hear what you're thinking!"

Renee will be monitoring this thread and promises to read every comment.


(Shy?  Have private feedback to share?  You can send email directly to me and I'll forward it to Renee:  Lori.Dirks [at] microsoft [dot] com  )


Cheers,
Lori Dirks
Expression Community Manager

Answer 1

Hey Renee (and Lori :) )

Feedback: well, you can read some of it in the other two threads of mine which pick up where I was on first download. I'm now a month in (after a decade or so from 1.2) and this'll be very design centric (although I do want to play with the other parts of the studio - just a bit hyper busy at the moment..)

Love: colour scheme and format of UI (with caveats below), drawing tools, fx filters (totally ace).

dislike: the number slider from the UI. The original setup worked so well that it should have been stolen and used in other programs, not dropped from the one piece of art software that did it right. ((Similarly will people PLEASE use ctrl, shift V for paste in place? Did Adobe copyright that or something?)) The fills, especially textured fills, are hard to make out when the UI is shrunk.

>dislike: Effect lines, fills and fringes were awesome and stupidly useful and, in all of the cases I need them, not replicatable via the fx filters.

Would love to see: image hose. stroke merging and morphing (would love to be able to choose segments of an outline and change the stroke type at varying points). stroke chaos to change three strokes next to each other enough to make it look more handdrawn. transparent background on layer preview (if you've got three highlight levels it's hard to make it out).

In terms of using the other packages no idea, sorry :( They're moderatley intimidating to someone who's less technically able (like me) and having to learn Blender and Lightwave for work (also me).

Apart from that I'm as keen on the software as I've ever been :) (bar the missing eff, f and f's). Nice one.

Paul.

[IMG]http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb274/apaulio/croc003.png[/IMG]

latest doodle.

Answer 2

Thanks, Paul!  I really appreciate your thoughtful and well articulated feedback.

I'd love to hear more about which of the products you find (moderately) intimidating to learn, and what kinds of resources might give you a head start or a helping hand.

I like your latest doodle.  I'd like to invite you to submit some of your work to our Gallery.  You can either use the link on the Gallery page, or send me an email directly at Lori [dot] Dirks [at] Microsoft [dot] com.

Cheers,
Lori

Answer 3

Working with Expression Web 2 (EW) for a few months now. We are developing in .net and that doesn't leave me much choice. Am an experienced Dreamweaver (DW) front-end designer and think that working on this large project with EW is like pushing rocks up a hill every day. I work in the split screen mode and the design view shows a distorted view of the master page 'design', while it displays correctly in browsers. In short, visually, nothing is what it seems in this program.

The site we are developing contains apps and static pages. The latest problem is importing/placing content from Word documents into the static pages. Content providers send content in Word documents and I put it into pages. DW does this flawlessly. Strips out all Word XML and applies the page styles automatically.

I've tried all means of cutting/pasting into EW, no format, text with line breaks, destination formats, etc., as well as saving filtered htm from Word, the results are all dysmal. There is no import feature for content text in EW either (why not?). In all cases, except the text options, there is always Word residue still in the code; or the text is stripped of absolutely everything, requiring a complete reformat of the page. Try this with several hundred pages coming at you.

If you can suggest a plugin, or truly efficient method on how to get this volume of content into pages without having to duplicate formatting work at every level, please, by all means, let us all know.

In short, my opinion of EW is that this tool is still very immature (for front-end design) and cannot be compared to the functionality and feature-richness of DW. I can't recommend any of it.

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Marianne

Answer 4

Thanks for the frank feedback, Marianne.

We have a short video that covers creating pages using Word documents, you can see it here:  http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc950446.aspx#  If you watch it, please take the time to rate the video and provide comments, (look in the upper right corner).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Lori Dirks
Community Manager
(and former front-end web designer/dev at Amazon)

Answer 5

Pixeldrummer said:

Working with Expression Web 2 (EW) for a few months now. We are developing in .net and that doesn't leave me much choice. Am an experienced Dreamweaver (DW) front-end designer and think that working on this large project with EW is like pushing rocks up a hill every day. I work in the split screen mode and the design view shows a distorted view of the master page 'design', while it displays correctly in browsers. In short, visually, nothing is what it seems in this program.

The site we are developing contains apps and static pages. The latest problem is importing/placing content from Word documents into the static pages. Content providers send content in Word documents and I put it into pages. DW does this flawlessly. Strips out all Word XML and applies the page styles automatically.

I've tried all means of cutting/pasting into EW, no format, text with line breaks, destination formats, etc., as well as saving filtered htm from Word, the results are all dysmal. There is no import feature for content text in EW either (why not?). In all cases, except the text options, there is always Word residue still in the code; or the text is stripped of absolutely everything, requiring a complete reformat of the page. Try this with several hundred pages coming at you.

If you can suggest a plugin, or truly efficient method on how to get this volume of content into pages without having to duplicate formatting work at every level, please, by all means, let us all know.

In short, my opinion of EW is that this tool is still very immature (for front-end design) and cannot be compared to the functionality and feature-richness of DW. I can't recommend any of it.

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Marianne

Hi Pixeldrummer,

Have you tried the Insert > File feature with a Word doc? It's not on the Insert menu by default but you can add it by choosing Tools > Customize, selecting Insert on the left in the dialog, scrolling down to the File command with the paper clip icon next to it, and drag it onto the real Insert menu in the program UI. Then put your cursor in your page, select Insert > File, select your Word doc.

Anna 

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http://blogs.msdn.com/anna

Answer 6

Thanks for this. The video showed me one new thing: How to customize the insert menu with 'insert file'. So I now know how to customize some things in this program. That's useful.

Tried to insert a Word 2007 docx file, saw the dialog 'converting into .rtf', then an error appeared that conversion was not possible. As soon as I clicked on the content area in EW to try again, "Microsoft Expression Web has Stopped Working" dialog appeared. Nothing new, this program crashed 4 times yesterday.

I have applied each of the other options shown in your video, but all, except for the text options, carried some or a lot of Word xml into the code mostly to bulleted and ordered lists.  

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Marianne

Answer 7

Can't help but posting again. I did do what was suggested, put 'file' into the 'Insert' menu. Can't use it though, EW crashes every time I try to insert a file. The first two times, the customization disappeared from the Insert menu. When debugging in Visual Studio I get the following:

Windows has triggered a breakpoint in EXPRWD.EXE.

This may be due to a corruption of the heap, which indicates a but in EXPRWD.EXE or any of the DLLs it has loaded.

This may also be due to the user pressing F12 while EXPRWD.EXE has focus.

The output window may have more diagnostic information.

I've downloade the cleaner software to clean up temporary EW files, etc., to no avail. Please point me to a forum where this might be addressed. I think I am now using the wrong thread to follow up.

Underlines the fact that my experience with EW has NOT be good!

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Marianne

Answer 8

Seems like there hasn't been a whole lot of updates on silverlight/wpf recently, but my company is trying to find out what kind of in-person courses Microsoft or Microsoft partner may offer that goes beyond the basics of WPF. Thanks,

Mark Weller

Software/hardware Developer
US Army, Electronic Proving Ground
Fort Huachuca, AZ
mark.a.weller.ctr(at)mail.mil

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-Mark Weller

Answer 9

Thanks, Mark.  I'll follow up with you over email.  I'm checking with some of the WPF experts here for their recommendations on in-person training options.

Cheers,

Lori

Answer 10

I am having a truly frustrating problem, so much so I am thinking of returing Expression Web 4.  AND I LOVED FRONT PAGE MAKER!!!!!!!  I want to transform my personal website into a business.  When I load the files created in Front Page Maker the header and footer triples!  The website is simply too extensive to go through and take it off on each page.  I saw through Google that others found the answer in taking it back into Front Page Maker and converting it.  I had to buy Expressions 4 because the old Front Page Maker would not load onto the new computer I bought when my other died.  I am nearly in tears thinking of how long I have worked on this and every time I save it triples again!!!!!!  Is there a download that would help with this problem?  An actual human being that might tell me how to fix this?  Is there an Expression version of Shared Borders that I have missed?

I cannot believe I spent 150 on a program that is so sorry you have to pay people to tell you how to fix it!  I wonder if there will be any response to this voice crying in the wilderness. 

Answer 11

Hi Sharman,

We offer learning resources to help people who are  transitioning from FrontPage ( http://expression.microsoft.com/dd326841.aspx ).  And there are some great people in the Expression Web Forum who have made the transition, and they might have some advice for you.

Thanks,

Lori

 

 

Answer 12

Shared Borders are a FrontPage thing - they are not supported by any version of Expression Web, though versions of EW before 4 will not trash them. The problem has been reported on Connect.

You can get the trial for expression Web 3 from

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0a73a3a7-3e06-4125-b3c6-f9c10387e9cc&displaylang=en

which you can use to repair the pages and remove the shared borders - though FrontPage will be better.

In my experience, FrontPage 2003 installs and  works on any version of Vista or Windows 7; if you have Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate the FrontPage can be installed in XP MOde - in other Windows OS or versions then a time limited VHD with Windows XP can be obtained from
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=11575
(choose Windows_XP_IE6.exe at bottom of file list).  This requires a (free) virtual PC obtainable at:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

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Ron Symonds
Microsoft MVP (Expression Web)

www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp