Microsoft Expression Studio - Web / Superpreview with ASP.NET

Question

Is there anyway to test an ASP.NET webpage fully with Expression Studio or is it only possible to see a static view of the page and no way to interact with any of the elements on the page?

Answer 1

I was under the impression that SuperPreview was effectively a static rendering of the page - you get DOM interactivity, but that was about it - it's not a webserver that can serve pages.

With a little bit of fiddling, you can get IIS up and running on XP or Vista (down to Home Premium I think - that's what I'm running with no problems), or you could install Visual Web Developer Express and use it's built in web server to test your site - VS and Expression share project files, so you should be able to open the site/pages with no issue.

Answer 2

Building upon Zhaph's answer, he's correct (or atleast as far as I've been able to find) that SuperPreview is purely a static rendering engine. I did find 2 programs that have been very useful to me.

First is Lunascape5, this is a multi-engine web browser that includes engines for Trident, Webkit and Gecko. So this is a good starting point for modern browsers. I did find a bug in the Gecko engine, it won't allow you to log into integrated security ASP.NET websites, nor will it correctly allow you to setup Auth handling to have it be integrated.

Moving onto to handle the bane known as IE I've found IETester which allows you to run side by side copies of IE 5.5, 6, 7 and 8 with full functionality. This replaced my previous copy of MultipleIEs installation because I ran into issues with IE6 not working correctly (can't highlight, can't type in forms). This tool is very nice and I strongly recommend it.

SuperPreview is very nice for it's DOM analysis functionality and measuring tools.

Answer 3

SuperPreview uses "Cassini" to view aspx pages. So you shouldn't have to use IIS unless there is some kind of complexity to your page that it can't handle.

Basically it is the same kind of support you get if you were in Visual Studio and did F5. Visual Studio starts a little web server down in the system tray. SuperPreview does the same thing.

Also, if you configure PHP in Expression Web then SuperPreview will be able to do some PHP files for you too.