Microsoft has announced that FrontPage is being discontinued at the end of 2006 and will be replaced with other development tools. FrontPage, an aging, no frills web design application was targeted at non-coding, non-designer web site builders which mainly used to tool to maintain company intranet or low budet web sites. In the professional design and development communities FrontPage was never considered a good option for building web sites.

Microsoft is preparing to launch it’s “Microsoft Expression” suite which contains: ‘Graphic Designer’, ‘Interactive Desginer’, and ‘Web Designer’. These powerfult tools represent Microsoft’s entry into the professional desgin software market. Expression looks to be targeted at Adobe and Macromedia design tools such as Ilustrator, Photoshop, GoLive, Flash, Driector, Dreamweaver. While not encompassing all the capabilities of the mentioned products from Adobe and Macromedia, Microsoft appears to be aiming toward the “sweet spot” in the market by incompassing the most common tools and providing additonal features in their products.

Microsoft Expresion Web Designer is a much needed replacement for the old FrontPage product. It has better capabilities for buildin and mananging style-sheets, integrates with ASP.NET 2.0 controls and databases without having to know how to write .NET code. The pae rendering in the application is such that you don’t have to go back and forth between the application and a web browser to see how the rendered code will look, a big draw back in FrontPage. Second-half 2006 is the target release date.

Another tool, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 focuses on allowing corporate users to build SharePoint sites, and even workflow’s – without having to have code execution rights or upload code on the server. Site administrators assigned users customization levels which give them different site design abilities.

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