New in July 2010

Regular readers will know already of my grumbling about Microsoft Expression Web. It’s the web-design software that I use for this site. In part, I’m captive to my reliance on features that I picked up a decade ago by using FrontPage, namely subsites and include pages, which I suspect are not fully supported by web-design software from Microsoft’s competitors. Another part to it is that if my ordinary use of software runs into bugs, then writing up those bugs seems more widely helpful if the software is Microsoft’s than anyone else’s. I never had to put that to the test until I started using Expression Web. I don’t use a lot of software and pretty much everything I do use is from Microsoft. Perhaps it’s just because I have only such narrow experience, but Expression Web is easily the most wretched software I have ever seen, let alone paid money for.

So, if you’re looking this month for anything new on Windows programming, I’m sorry. I too would really very much prefer that I had nothing bad to say about the software I use to write for this website. It ought just work acceptably as a tool that fits its stated purpose. It doesn’t, and I mean to do my share of recording this. Between that and the demands of paid work and of my own research, there is no time left over this month for other (free) writing. That is the way of things.

Notes