Actually, the web isn’t littered with reviews of Microsoft’s follow-up to hideous FrontPage, may it never return. The beta got some decent coverage last year, and now that the final product is out it might be interesting to know what the Microsoft solution to Dreamweaver can do.

For experienced developers who are happiest working in the code, Expression Web doesn’t get in the way. Unlike its predecessor Frontpage it doesn’t try to change your code to suit itself and the excellent rendering engine seems capable of rendering most layouts. As with any visual environment, working out how to create CSS visually takes a little effort, but if you are someone who enjoys working visually it would be worth the time spent as the rendering engine is very faithful to the view in a modern browser.

In other words, the Vitamin review is positive, rating Microsoft Expression Web 3 out of 5. However, it points to some silly problems with the beginner’s guide templates, with broken columns and that actually being the sample in the manual! Weird, how did that get through?

Lee Underwood over at EarthWeb WebReference wrote a review on it as well, however I didn’t tell me anything really, other than the direct link to the trial version of course, which you probably should check out if you’re doing your hacking in a visual editor (like Dreamweaver, FrontPage and so on). Me? Oh, I do it by hand in a text-only editor. That’s what you get when you’ve been doing web pages since 1996… It’s a feature!

Check out the Microsoft Expression Web product page, as well as the download page for the free trial, if you want to know more.

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