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?
A:
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.
Zhaph - Ben Duguid
2009-08-24 20:28:47
Obviously I'm already developing in VS with IIS, I wanted to be able to test functionality in superpreview also sadly it doesn't seem to be possible. And actually it does have a webserver included, it looks like the same webserver that's built into VS.
Chris Marisic
2009-08-25 12:26:41
Cool, good to know. But yeah, I think SuperPreview is still image based and non-interactive.
Zhaph - Ben Duguid
2009-08-25 12:55:21
SuperPreview uses the same built in web server that Visual Web Developer Express does.
Steven
2010-04-03 18:44:14
+1
A:
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.
Chris Marisic
2009-08-31 13:17:58
A:
wow, expression web is great!, here is another topic: http://jack-fx.com/csharp/post/expression-web-superpreview.htm
Jack
2009-10-19 08:31:46
A:
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.
Steven
2010-04-03 18:43:10
The issue is unfortunately that you can't interact with any of form elements on the page effectively making it worthless for a web application since most actions will cause changes to html.
Chris Marisic
2010-04-04 01:33:54