May, 2008

The Expression website was relaunched yesterday with a fresh new look and experience to coincide with the release of Expression Studio 2. Now you can get your hands on free trial versions of each program in Expression Studio 2 including Expression Web 2 or buy the program.

So what's new in Expression Web 2?

• Efficiently edit your PHP pages with the robust set of PHP editing features, including PHP Include rendering in the design surface
  
• Preview your PHP and ASP.NET pages in your browser with a single click of a button, using the built-in Expression Development Server
  
• Import Photoshop .PSD files
• Add Flash or Windows Media files to your pages, and enhanced ActiveX support
• Drag and drop ASP.NET AJAX controls into your pages
• Harness the power of ASP.NET 3.5
• Work with custom ASP.NET controls, such as the controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, simply by adding the controls to the BIN folder in your website
• Accurate design view rendering of the CSS Overflow property, and support for the IE 7 CSS Schema
• Enhanced FTP publishing
• Improved prebuilt CSS page layouts
• Byte order mark options
  
• Support for Silverlight 1

You can buy the upgrade for version 2 for only $99 if you own any of the following:

• Licensed copy of an earlier version of Expression Web
• Adobe Creative Suite - any version
• Adobe/Macromedia Flash or Director - any version
• Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver - any version
• Adobe GoLive - any version
• Microsoft Office - any version
• Microsoft FrontPage® - any version
• Quark QuarkXPress - any version
• Corel - any version
  

 Once you've installed Expression Web 2, discuss the program with others at the newish Expression Web forum., check out learning options at the newish Expression Community website, or checkout the newsgroup for Expression Web. And submit feedback at the Connect website for Expression.

Anna
 

Hewlett Packard is providing a free online training for Expression Web 1 (not version 2 of Expression Web) by Virginia O'Connor. Even though the course is for version 1 of Expression Web, I didn't see anything in the content that can't be applied to version 2.

The training consists of four lessons from May 8 - June 13th, 2008 and their website indicates the training materials will be taken down when the course ends so be sure to sign uo and get the content before June 13th, 2008.

Here's the course description from the HP website:

Building websites with Expression Web

This class covers the basics for creating a website with Microsoft's Expression® Web with features such as toolbars, formatting, page layouts and link creation. With this easy website creation software, you'll apply cascading style sheets, then learn how to create complex queries, how to configure the software for different browsers and how to create interactive web pages with ASP.NET 2.0 capabilities.

http://h30187.www3.hp.com/sessions/overview/p/courseSessionId/16257

Anna