In previous months we have been evaluating Expression Web as a tool to replace Dreamweaver in my company.

While Dreamweaver is a great tool it still misses good support for ASP.NET and general .NET tools and features (e.g.SourceSafe, Master pages, Controls…) which criples down our design department when they need to work with us - the development department on a project.

To aid of this, for some time our designers had Visual Studio installed… but really this was not a solution… it’s too big, too slow and has too many features for what they want.

Now (actually not now, but now it came into play) we’ve came accross Expression Web which we’ve hoped will solve some of these problems… and it really did… to some point.


Before ranting about the bad thing(s), there are some obvious advantages and good things about Expression web like the painless integration with .NET (ASP.NET) features and good HTML editing features (believe me… when our designers are happy with it… it really means it’s good not that bad).


But one BIG shortcoming of the tool… How can a tool which is used for professional work not have Source Control integration? I mean… in this day and age… when we have great source control tools and even Microsoft has a not so bad one (Team System Source Control)… come one people… How do you think that professional teams will work together? By making backups on shares?

This can be bypassed by using the Source Control client and checking out items and then editing them in EW, but that is not really what we want, is it?

Hope they do something about this… this was one of my main selling points to management and it came up short on it… come on people!