Microsoft has announced their new development software, called Expression (and so the inevitable death of Frontpage by June 2008 - yey!). It is a set of graphic, interactive and web software which is aimed at the Windows application and web developers. I don’t know about this one, can it be good enough to pry away creatives from their Macs and Adobe products? Does anyone have time to learn another product? The first 2 packages are available now for trial, I’m going to have a play with the web segment when it comes out, but I have a feeling it’ll be one of those trials I end up removing rather than upgrading.
From the video-demo the web part looks a lot like most other visual development environments for the web, though it appears to have a rendering engine built from the ground-up to be standards-compliant and that isn’t IE7. Why not? Personally I’d still be testing everything in multiple browsers starting with FireFox. Built-in rendering engines just make me suspicious.