14 DAY TRIAL // The first upgrade for Expression Web 4 is now available for download from Microsoft. Customers can head over to the Download Center and grab Expression Web 4 Service Pack 1 RTM immediately. According to the software giant, existing users of Expression Web 4 will be able to notice improvements across the table, with the most consistent changes impacting publishing, SuperPreview, file management, and extensibility.
Steve Guttman, Product Unit Manager, Expression Web reveals that Expression Web 4 SP1 RTM is designed to reflect the evolution of Internet Explorer 9 in terms of modern web standards support, especially around HTML5 and CSS3 support.
“We’ve added IntelliSense for the complete HTML5 specification, IntelliSense for the (evolving) CSS3 draft spec, support for all new CSS properties in the CSS Properties palette, and support for selected CSS properties in the Style dialogs,” he stated.
At the same time, Expression Web 4 SP1 is designed to play nice with IE9 RTW. Essentially, with SP1, Expression Web 4 developers are able to preview their web projects via Snapshot and see how they look in Internet Explorer 9.
“If you haven’t checked out SuperPreview in a while, you’ll want to. There are quite a few improvements including support for Chrome (via our online service) as well as IE9 rendering,” Guttman added.
“One request we heard a lot was the need to compare pages that are behind a login screen. SuperPreview SP1 includes a new feature called “Page Interaction Mode” that lets you browse interactively to your page of interest, and then submits that page to your set of chosen browsers.”
Web developers will be glad to know that Expression Web 4 SP1 RTM will integrate seamlessly into their copy of Windows, searching for all browsers installed, including Chrome, Safari and Opera, and making it as simple as possible to preview web projects in each of the browsers available.
“We’ve updated our PHP support with hundreds of functions from PHP5, added a number of new niceties like “Open as PHP,” “Open folder in Windows Explorer,” “Copy File Path,” and others. We’ve also added IntelliSense for extended characters—so, as soon as you type a “&”—you’ll get a list of the HTML character entities that filters as you continue to type,” Guttman said.
Expression Web 4 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008 SP2 is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows Vista SP2 64-bit edition and Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit edition is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 64-bit edition, Windows 7 SP1 64-bit edition, Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit edition and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 64-bit edition is available for download here.