Microsoft to release CTP of Expression Web Designer

The million-dollar question: will Microsoft's Expression package (which includes Graphic, Interactive, and Web Designer flavors) dethrone Adobe as king of multimedia creation? Today, according to Techworld, Microsoft's Expression Web Designer will be released as a Community Technology Preview today. The big difference between this tool and Adobe's Dreamweaver? According to the one guy quoted in the article, it's deep support for ASP 2.0. I'll admit, Dreamweaver's pretty lame when it comes to working in ASP (although to be honest I'm still stuck in ASP 1.1 land myself). But the question is really: will consumers upgrade to Vista fast enough for Windows Presentation Framework to be relevant? In other words, just buying Expression won't guarantee clients or customers can see your coolio new content. Granted, WPF can be installed across a variety of machines that don't need Vista (they released an OS X version, in fact). But with an installed user base for Flash hovering around 98+ percent, are consumers going to download yet another framework? Anyone remember the Great Code Hope that was .NET? We'll see. I still think Adobe and Macromedia were smart to merge before Vista hits though... Just for the record though, I am actually pretty excited about Windows Presentation Framework. If nothing else, it'll force Adobe to continue making Flash better.

Tags: beta, commercial, ctp, dreamweaver, expression, news, web design, WebDesign, windows presentation framework, WindowsPresentationFramework, wpf