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Microsoft Expression Web 4 and Expression Design 4 Now a FREE Download!

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Been battling maintaining a creaky old website for years using, I guess you might call 'Unauthorised versions' of Frontpage and then the original Expression Web and finally spat it tonight and decided to upgrade.

Lo and behold it's now offered free as it is the last version and Microsoft are stopping support - Happy daays!!!

Fired Expression web 4 up and it's looking pretty sweet. Haven't tried Design 4 yet but for the price I'm sure it will also be a bargain :)

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  • +7

    Just so people know - the Expression brand was retired about 2.5 years ago and frankly hasn't been up to date for 3-4 years. Good for messing around with, not good if you want up to date web or otherwise design.

    • Blend (formerly Expression Blend) is now part of Visual Studio (VS2012 includes 'Blend for Visual Studio' with support for WinRT apps, and a version with support for Silverlight/WPF will be released with VS2012 Update 2), but it seems the other programs in the Expression suite have been abandoned.

      I guess the idea is for people to use Visual Studio Express for Web instead of Expression Web, but I would have thought Visual Studio to be a bit full-on for those used to Expression Web or Frontpage. I guess there's WebMatrix, but that's aimed at a different audience again.

      • I have been using Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web (free download) on Windows 8 (got a free licence from Uni… still trying to make it useful) for a couple weeks. It's actually pretty good, I prefer it over notepad since it has syntax highlighting, auto completion and has an integrated web server.

  • +8

    I miss the old days of dreamwaver, remember when web developers knew what jpeg compression was? I love every site being 1MB+ in 2013 /s

    • +2

      I certainly don't miss the abortion code that Dreamweaver produced. In the early 2000's I used to be almost full time just "repairing" pages and sites so that they worked in most browsers. Or when the author clicked somewhere and inserted text, then it completely broke everything.

      Dreamweaver's default image preloading script was unique - it did the preloading AFTER the webpage loaded, which was kind of pointless. And designers didn't understand that you were only supposed to use it for rollovers, not EVERY image on the page LOL

      But I agree on the images now days. The worst is those dreadful 3 or 4MB animated GIFs that people use instead of showing an AVI or Flash or whatever. Gosh they are awful, and they absolutely kill my old computer

      • -3

        I disagree.

        I started using Dreamweaver around version 8 before the Adobe buyout.

        The code is produced was very clean and optimised.

        Its great software for learning HTML as well.

      • +2

        Ah yeah, those Dreamweaver JavaScript functions. My favourite was this one:

        function MM_openBrWindow(theURL,winName,features) { //v2.0
            window.open(theURL,winName,features);
        }
        

        I've always been curious as to what v1.0 looked like.

        Those image preload scripts were nowhere near as bad as the Java applets (!!) for menu buttons in FrontPage. Sites with heaps of those used to slow my computer to a crawl while Java fired up for each one.

        • hahaah that's a brilliant piece of code! I too wish I could see v1

  • Been using version 3 at work. Now we can update to version 4 for free. Thanks for the heads up.

  • Should i get this or am i better off sticking with dreamweaver 2004?

  • Thanks mate

  • fantastic. been using expression web since back when it was a (loose) part of office 2007…forgotten about it for a while since i stopped making ebay listings, but i'll definitely give this a download

    thanks OP!

  • +1

    Notepad works better!

    • +1

      and Notepad++ works better than that…

      • ++1!

      • …and Sublime Text works better than both.

        • Sublime Text is too expensive for an OzBargainer though - Especially seeing as you can get pretty good text editors for free. I'd rather pay for JetBrains WebStorm as it offers much more than Sublime Text does.

  • Would anyone advise using this over Dreamweaver CS6 for a newbie. I'm studying for Developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5 and CSS3 070-480

    • For Windows 8 apps I'd use the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8, as it's got all the tooling to make it easier to develop Windows 8 apps. It's free for anyone, you just need to register to get a free license key. Additionally, if you're a student, you can get a free version of the full Visual Studio 2012 from Dreamspark.

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