I was looking at using VWD to replace my FrontPage, but after reading about the website deployment I have some concerns. Apparently with VWD "precompilation" is the best way to go. I couldn't see any equivalent in VWD to "publishing changed pages" in FP, or to marking individual pages to not be published when changed pages are published. EW seems to provide these options. Does that mean that pages are not compiled in EW? Is there a way to publish changed pages only in VWD, and to hold back certain changed pages from being published?
Neither VWD nor EW provides the easy drag and drop navigation structure found in FP, unfortunately.
Our website is mainly text content, but we also have "calculators", which I create in Excel and convert to HTML using SpreadsheetConverter.
Is anyone familiar enough with both products to advise me about the above questions, or to tell me the major differences between the two products? Advantages/disadvantages?
Visual Web Developer is actually a development tool kit for doing ASP.Net web applications. Expression Web is a design tool kit for designing web sites and web pages. Visual Web Developer has some limited functionality for doing design work. Expression Web has some limited capability for doing ASP.Net-related work. So, assuming you're talking about a web site that is not a web application, Expression Web would be your replacement for FrontPage.
No, it doesn't have all of the functionality of FrontPage. It is quite actually a vast improvement over FrontPage in many ways. It is standards-compliant, supports CSS extremely well, and does not require the use of FrontPage server extensions. It doesn't automatically change any markup code you write by hand. But it does do a lot that FrontPage did not, and does not do a few things that FrontPage did, for good reasons. Yes, there is a learning curve to adapting to Expression Web, but in many ways it works a lot like FrontPage, and you shouldn't have much trouble adapting to it.
HTHKevin Spencer, Chicken Salad Alchemist
Proposed as answer byKevin SpencerSunday, June 22, 2008 5:57 PM
Visual Web Developer is actually a development tool kit for doing ASP.Net web applications. Expression Web is a design tool kit for designing web sites and web pages. Visual Web Developer has some limited functionality for doing design work. Expression Web has some limited capability for doing ASP.Net-related work. So, assuming you're talking about a web site that is not a web application, Expression Web would be your replacement for FrontPage.
No, it doesn't have all of the functionality of FrontPage. It is quite actually a vast improvement over FrontPage in many ways. It is standards-compliant, supports CSS extremely well, and does not require the use of FrontPage server extensions. It doesn't automatically change any markup code you write by hand. But it does do a lot that FrontPage did not, and does not do a few things that FrontPage did, for good reasons. Yes, there is a learning curve to adapting to Expression Web, but in many ways it works a lot like FrontPage, and you shouldn't have much trouble adapting to it.
HTHKevin Spencer, Chicken Salad Alchemist
Proposed as answer byKevin SpencerSunday, June 22, 2008 5:57 PM
As Kevin describes, EW is the natural successor to FP, with VWDE having features aimed more at code development. EW works very well in tandem with VWDE when you need to work with code.
Out of interest, here's a list of things which EW supports and VWDE doesn't. (It refers to Orcas, the early VS2008 beta, but is still valid).
