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Barenuckle Boxing: Microsoft vs Adobe

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I love a good cat fight and the MSDN team have just come out with this new comparison of features between Dreamweaver 8 (in the green corner) and Visual Studio 2005 (in the red corner).  It was only recently that Microsoft openly admitted that the new Expression set of tools would be competing head-to-head with Adobe and this is the first round of exchanges that we will see in this space.

A series of videos on the following feature sets help explain in a clear way the different products help the user complete common tasks:

  • Document Windows & Panels
  • Code Editors
  • Components & Toolbox
  • Design Notes
  • Help Features
  • Properties
  • CSS
  • Customizing & Extending
  • Optimizing Code
  • Templates & Master Pages
  • Code & Compiling
  • Database Support
  • XML & XLST
  • User Controls
  • Login Controls
  • Membership Controls
  • Consuming Web Services
  • Providing Web Services
  • Dubugging
  • Source Control
  • WCAG / Section 508
  • Deployment

As a past user developer of web applications I would spend time in both applications.  I would use Visual Studio to code and put together the server side code and application logic, whilst Dreamweaver would be called into action when I needed to make it look nice and play around with CSS etc.  So effectively I'd be doing two roles; a developer and a designer - and to be honest switching out of one app into another was a pain.  Not to mention the fact I'd need to buy two software packages!

What Microsoft is trying to do is make designers and developers aware that you can do everything you need to do to create powerful and good looking web applications using one dev environment which provides a more seamless and quicker way of working.

Open Visual Studio Projects in Expression - seamless team working

What they don't mention in the videos is that with the Expression tools; Web Designer, Interactive Designer & Graphic Designer; you can seamlessly work with Visual Studio projects.  What this means is that when your developers create projects in Visual Studio - like a C# project - they can chuck it into source control and then the creative designers open it up in Web Designer or Interactive Designer and play around with the UI and look and feel. 

This provides fantastic integration and allows different teams with different skill sets to collaborate on the same project with a minimum of effort.

How do the Microsoft Expression products interoperate with Microsoft Visual Studio?

Each of the Microsoft Expression family of tools can be used together with Visual Studio for collaborative designer/developer workflow. Expression Graphic Designer provides output in a variety of industry-standard graphic formats (such as JPEG and PNG) for incorporation into Visual Studio projects, and designs can be saved as XAML, the markup language that describes user interface elements and media for the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Expression Interactive Designer shares the same project files as Visual Studio, and can pass both XAML and VB.NET/C# code back and forth between the applications so that designers can design the look, feel and behavior of the user interface. Developers can add functionality and build and deploy.

Expression Web draws on site functionality and Web services created in Visual Studio, and both products can be used collaboratively between designers laying out pages and developers building back-end functionality. ASP.NET 2.0 code and controls are fully compatible, and the design preview surface within both products is identical so that designers and developers can work on the same solution and build the better end-user experiences.

Check out the comparison yourself here:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/compare/vs05_dw/