www.MicrosoftBob.com

November, 1995 - Vermeer FrontPage 1.0
(Version 1.0)

Mini Review: Believe it or not, FrontPage 1.0 ran on Windows 3.x and Windows NT 3.5.1. This required installing a Win32 subsystem for Windows 3.x, which was fraught with installation errors.

The program itself had a nasty little issue - if this version saw some HTML that it didn't like, it just deleted it!  (:-O)
This version was very limited, and it didn't even support tables.

June, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.1
(Version 1.1)

Mini Review: FrontPage 1.1 was Microsoft's first release for the FrontPage family of products. It supported tables, thankfully, and it supported frames, even though Microsoft's Internet Explorer still didn't. (:-])

October, 1996 - Microsoft FrontPage 97
(Version 2)

January, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 1.0 for Macintosh
(Version  2)

September, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage Express 2.0
Note: Shipped with Internet Explorer 4.0

December, 1997 - Microsoft FrontPage 98
(Version 3)

March, 1999 - Microsoft FrontPage 2000
(Version 4)

June, 2001 - Microsoft FrontPage 2002
(Version 5 [≈10])

October, 2003 - Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003
(Version 6 [≈11])

Mini Review: FrontPage 2003 is my favorite version of FrontPage. There's a great balance of powerful functionality and ease-of-use.

Note: On a sad note, this is the last of the FrontPage family of products - Microsoft is now only making Expression Web.

November, 2006 - Expression Web Designer 2007
(Version 7 [≈12])
Note: Sadly, the "FrontPage" product has ceased to exist and has been
replaced by Expression Web Designer and Office SharePoint Designer

Mini Review: After having used the beta versions of these programs, I was looking forward to their release versions with a great deal of anticipation. Having said that, now that I've used the release versions I can honestly say that I absolutely hate the way that these programs format their HTML code.

The ability to use normal HTML tags for formatting text has been removed from these two products in favor of using CSS almost everywhere. For example, when indenting a section of text, these two programs create a custom CSS class or an in-line style instead of using the <blockquote> tag like any other decent HTML editor would do. But it doesn't stop there, the more formatting options you apply, the more complex the page-level classes get, and there's no standardization across separate pages so there's no way to re-use code between different pages. This is just wrong, and it's really bad for those authors that like to cut & paste code between different pages.

In the end, there's some cool new ASP.NET stuff, but in my opinion the ability to write pages the way you want has been crippled, and that makes the program impossible for many serious developers to use.

April, 2008 - Expression Web 2
(Version 8 [≈13])

Mini Review: Expression Web 2 has some great new features like PHP color coding and such, but my pet peeve from the first version is still there. The way that Expression applies styles to everything leaves you with code that's difficult to read and next to impossible to reuse. If you start your code somewhere else and pull it into Expression Web 2 it gets mangled. Older versions of FrontPage used to do that, but Expression Web seems to have regressed on that behavior.