by-expressions

Now that we have moved all the content from by-expression.com into the new community server 2008 based site I will be moving my blog in there as well. Sadly since there is not a good migration tool right now I will not be moving the archive over yet but all new posts will be at http://by-expression.com/blogs/by-expression/ so please update your feed to http://by-expression.com/blogs/by-expression/rss.aspx if you aren’t using Feedburner (where I have done the update for you.

BTW, when you visit the new site, check out our newest blogger Rob Giordano, fellow Expression Web MVP.

What is it moving the Webmaster Jam Session conference to Atlanta?

Ever since the first Webmaster Jam in Dallas two years ago this has been one of my favorite conferences. Top notch speakers, a reasonable price, altogether a great conference. The only downside was the conference hotel which sucked. The conference facilities were good but the hotel itself was NOT. At the end of the conference last year there was some discussion of moving the conference to Houston or at least to a different hotel so I was anticipating (happily) a change of venue.

To my surprise when I received word today that registration was opening for WebMaster Jam 2008 the conference was moved to ATLANTA. Crap, I really liked having a good small conference that was in Texas.

In addition, last year there was a "Platinum Pass" available with extra small session content.  Every platinum pass holder I talked to last year would get a platinum pass again. Not only does that option not appear to be available this year the website itself is sketchy on details. Compare the information available about the 2008 conference http://2008.webjamsession.com/ with the 2007 conference http://2007.webjamsession.com. Heck, there isn’t even hotel information on the website.

Over the last few years I have attended quite a few conferences ranging from small intimate ones like Webmaster Jam Session and Remix Boston, the way up to the huge conferences like MIX, SXSW and TechEd (I am hoping to make it to AdobeMAX this year) and Webmaster Jam Session has been up at the top of my list of "best" conference to attend.

Sadly, I am not sure that I will be able to make it this year with the move to Atlanta and the lack of information on the site.

According to MacWorld at http://www.macworld.com/article/133181/2008/04/golivedead.html  GoLive is officially a dead program.

While Adobe is discontinuing development and sales of GoLive, the company will continue to support GoLive users with online tutorials and migration assistance created by usage experts. The company has also collaborated with online training service Lynda.com to provide tutorials for GoLive users. Adobe is expected to pull sales links for GoLive from its Web site late on Monday.

Adobe is also offering a $199 upgrade for registered GoLive users to switch to Dreamweaver. More details will be posted to Adobe’s Web site.

Seems that too many people prefer Dreamweaver something that does not surprise me at all. Personally when I saw that neither of the Adobe CS3 we Suites (Standard or Premium) included GoLive I figured the handwriting was on the wall for it.

Hopefully the promised migration resources will be up to the usual high standards we associate with Lynda.com materials.

The forums have been successfully migrated to the new community server platform. We are in the process of migrating the rest of the site contents over.

Since there is not a converter to migrate this blog over right now I have decided to keep it in WordPress (updated to the latest version) for the time being. As a result the URL for this blog has changed from blog.by-expression.com to http://blog.by-expression.net so that it may continue to reside on the old server.

My plan is to have a permanent redirect from the one url to the other but I would appreciate that anyone subscribing to this blog go ahead and change over their subscription. (You know it occurs to me that I should have written this before the url transfer. )

Oh well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles when you are trying to do too many things at once.

We are migrating our forums from Community Server 2.1 to 2008 over the next few days. During the migration our forums will be closed but we hope to have the new and improved version up again within a few days.

For the last 4-5 days I have been in Seattle surrounded by almost 1,800 MVPs from around the world. Not only was I able to meet Expression MVPs from the US, Germany and India but spend hours with the members of Microsoft development teams for Expression Studio programs and the IE 8 team to see whole is planned for future. Unfortunately most of what we saw and heard we cannot shore but there are a few tidbits we can pass on.

First, at MIX in response to audience question the EW team members said that version two would he released writhes months of MlX. While, I can’t tell you when v2 will be released ( I don’t have a date so I could not tell you if I wanted too), what I can tell you is what purchase date qualifies for a free upgrade to EW v2. That date is: February 24th 2008.

So if you purchased Expression Web after February 24th 2008 you will be able to get version too free.

Second, bugs you file on connect really are seen by members of the Expression Web team. We met them and even got to see how bogs get into the system then what happens to them. So felt those bugs but when you do provide Step by step what you did and what happened. Include what you expected to happen. Screenshots or even short video captures such as the ones created by Jing (free ttp://www.jingproject.com) so Microsoft can understand your problem and has enough info to find & fix it.

Now 8 is time for me to shut down this computer and head to the airport. after I get home I have a few video clips of the Expression and FrontPage MVPs who attended the summit I will be posting so you for can put a face to the MVP names you know.

Title of the session is Comp  CSS, Code.

It started with a video then went into who is the target audience. The “person” profit is “Anna” a 28 year old, standards compliant html & CSS in a “loft” agency in Seattle using PHP for dynamic intent and JavaScript. AJAX. Reads a variety of web design and CSS, standards based design books. She cares about standards mark-up and accessibility.

Target: Professional Front-end Web Developer

Demos:Nishant Kothany showed customize a Word Press template. Including CSS where despite using PX for text warned that pixels were used for demo purposes only and to use EMS in the real world.

Bringing in a PSD then exporting part wanted from layer as a slice gif using image replacement as an accessibility technique. Though I don”t agree with the rationale for using an image replacement technique.

Demo passed to Tyler Simpson to hook up the dummy placeholder to real content flickr and WordPress PHP-MySQL. IntelliSense for globals, functions, http headers along with color coding. (Side note Vista SP 1 adds the FastCGI implementation of PHP to IIS 7)

Q&A

Q: When will V2 be released?

A: Short release cycle-after beta months not year.

Q: How best to deal with ASP.NET ID changes when rendered?

A: CSS friendly adopters, using classes, or descendent selectors.

Q: Support for ASP. NET third party controls?

A: Supports controls deployed to site bin, no need to install in the GAC. The design surface is in sync with Visual Studio 2008.

Q: Intelligence for JavaScript?

A: Very limited

Q: Support for versioning control systems such as Team Foundation Server and Subversion?

A: Not in this version but since it is a highly requested feature it should be added in a future version.

Q: Secure FTP?

A: Is still not there but should he in a future version.

The session recording should be up in 24 hours at http://sessions.visitmix.com

Is Now Available!

To download and install the Expression Web 2 Beta, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=web2beta

So what is new?

PHP, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX Stacked with new features, Expression Web 2 provides

For PHP :

PHP syntax highlighting and IntelliSense.

Expression Web 2 lets you preview PHP pages
locally using the same development server as ASP. NET 2.0,

For Media: Silverlight and Flash, allows you to easily include media content in your sites.

Improved workflow with the ability to import
Adobe Photoshop pd files into your sites with layer visibility control, and round trip changes with layer settings retained.