It appears that Web Designer is part of a suite of apps that has yet to launch, called Microsoft Expression. It will contain three apps: Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. Graphic Designer will be a marriage (in MS fashion) of Fireworks, Illustrator and Photoshop (we’ll see how well that comes out), Interactive Designer will be a UI design/destop app tool (it integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio), and Web Designer will of course go after Dreamwever, as detailed before, emphasizing the MS coding platforms (ASP, ASP.NET).

Graphic Designer and Interactive Designer are still in community edition (read flaky), and it looks like Interactive Designer will only work with .NET Framework 3.0 plus Visual Studio Express (at least). Web Designer is out in Beta and ready for download and use.

I have to ponder MS’ reach on this. They’re clearly building upon their strengths and going after their competitors, which is what they’ve always done, but to go after Photoshop and Dreamweaver is pretty lofty. Only time (and users) will tell whether they’ve managed to reach the target, or, in usual MS fashion, delivered something half-baked. Now we begin to see where all that R&D money went — it didn’t just go to Vista, it also went to stuff like this.