The other day I complained about Expression Web and it's seeming lack of support for custom controls. Well today, AndrewJ, the Expression Web program manager responds:
Unfortunately, in Expression Web, you cannot insert custom controls into the Toolbox
Blarg! He does go on to mention that it is possible to add them to the GAC and have them show up in the designer. Greeeeat. So, the non-asp.net designers will be able to SEE the controls in the designer, there's just no easy way to get them there.
What's funny, is if you peruse the Expression discussion groups, it's basically people complaining that Expression is lacking features that once existed in FrontPage. Like this:
I have spent several days working with EWD. It is very disappointing for
someone like me who is a keen hobbyist. FP had simple one-click
functionalities, like the publishing wizard, navigation and shared borders,
and these have been stripped out in favour of the code jokeys.
To be honest, I had no idea that people even used FrontPage anymore, let alone use it for dynamic stuff. I guess as a web developer I live on an island of sorts, and I forget that there's hundreds of thousands of people creating basic sites armed with little else than FP and an internet connection.
So it seems once again Microsoft can't make everyone happy. I guess they were walking a fine line in developing Expression - FrontPage users vs. Professional Designers/Dreamweaver users. It just seemed to me from the outset that they were positioning Expression more for the latter. I also figured that they were aiming to build a profession design program to seemlessly integrate with their web development platform (ASP.NET). Wouldn't this serve to increase the acceptance and adoption of ASP.NET?
As a developer, I'm all too familiar with the fact that there is limited time to fit unlimited features into a product. Clearly there was a trade off between developer features and FP features, and the latter won out. This is even more evident given Microsoft's much-contested move to not include Expression Web in MSDN.
Sadly there is nothing I can do. I was really quite excited about the product, as it fits in nicely with project here at work that I'm working on. I have positioned our company move AWAY from Dreamweaver because of EW's supposed integration with ASP.NET. However, I was let down badly by Microsoft, as it's support for ASP.NET is only marginally more usefull than Dreamweaver's (which is basically non-existant).
Boo them.