Are you tracking all the new things in web development?

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I created a couple of web pages today. I fired up Notepad and started entering raw HTML instructions. Now granted these were simple pages that merely redirected people to actual interesting exciting web pages but still I felt comfortable and at home. I'm pretty old school when it comes to the world wide web. I've had my own domain for about 8 years and have been writing web pages in one form or another for around 12 years. Back then it was all simple as long as you were fine with markup languages. Of course not everyone was fine with markup languages.

But things are moving fast. At one point I learned FrontPage and have used that to maintain most of my domain web site for quite some time. I like it. It's simple. But things are moving on. I have used some of the web programming features of Visual Studio and experimented with Visual Web Developer Express. I like it. It's powerful. Its not quite so simple though.

But things are moving fast. Expression Web is out and I've installed it. I'm going to be spending some time learning it over the next couple of weeks. It looks fun and easy. It's going to replace FrontPage for me and for a great many others. Silverlight, another recent product announcement for web development, looks like an amazing and powerful tool for web development as well.

Today Microsoft announced PopFly. PopFly is a web mashup tool. It lets one create mashups, web pages and web applications quickly and easily. It has been designed for non-professional developers as a way to empower them to do powerful things quickly and easily. It's built on Silverlight BTW. IT could probably never been developed so easily and quickly without it.

PopFly is also going to have a community built around it so over time there should be a lot of help for people getting started.

The world wide web made the Internet accessible for a lot of non-technical (or at least less technical) people. Increasingly new tools are making web page creation more easy, more powerful, more flexible - really just more of everything. As blogging tools made some sorts of Internet publication more easily tools like Silverlight and PopFly are potentially taking things to a whole new level. Where are we going to go with it? I have no idea but it is going to be quite some ride!

I'm just having trouble keeping up. Oh to be young and energetic enough to learn all this stuff as fast as it comes out.

Technorati tags: Expression, silverlight, popfly, visual studio express, VWD, FrontPage, web development