When I first saw Microsoft Expression Web Designer Beta, I went through a flash back more than 6 years from now, when I was a junior web developer I had to work tightly with web designers, giving them our asp pages so they can dress it with their fancy designs, most of the time what we got is broken pages and inconsistent html code since i was new to web development my mind was screaming WHY! WHY! WHY!, Why they do this to our work? the answers was obvious they are designers the way they look to the pages is different from the way we look to it, they see it as a painting place how it looks is his job so if it looks cool then his job is done even if it had lost its functionality :-(
Things had been changed since that time designers start to master HTML more than before, they got the idea (COOL) using more professional tools Like Macromedia Dream weaver things start to work better for web development, after all the .net Web development boom we start to face the same problem again designers are getting our pages and corrupt it (NO NO NO not again plz), now I have more experience to figure the reason its the lack of easy to use Professional design tools,
Try to convince one of them to work on Visual Studio and you will cause a disaster :-).
Hay man they are designers maybe they need some designer friendly tool, maybe Dreamweaver, sure they are happy now but wait why are Custom Server controls are missed here ooh no they delete it why? Cause they are designers they are not responsible about it its all Macromedia dreamweaver fault it doesn't show our asp.net pages as the Visual Studio do.
Now back to the future Microsoft came with the long waiting solution Microsoft Expression Web Designer hoping to fill the gap between the developers tools like Visual Studio and the designers tools like Macromedia Dreamweaver with tight support for asp.net.
Now let’s open a project in it and c how it looks like:
Blank Page
Let’s open a web site
U can call it Visual Studio for web designers ;-)
Normal Web Design and Code and Preview split, enjoy
Master Page Design, a piece of cake
Standard VS Controls, u have no excuse now designers :-)
So now with expression designers now have the same power developers used to have with visual studio, now finally I can say let's relax war is over now let's live in peace together developers and designers.