Ding Dong the FrontPage Is Dead!

The wicked witch of the Office system. Microsoft FrontPage will be gone and pull a Jesus move with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007:

The Microsoft® Office and Server & Tools teams are proud to announce the introduction of two great new tools for application building and Web authoring in 2006:

1. Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007: Automate your business processes and build efficient applications on top of the SharePoint platform, and tailor your SharePoint® site to your needs in an IT-managed environment.
2. Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer: Take advantage of the best of dynamic Web site design, enabling you to design, develop, and maintain exceptional standards-based Web sites.

These two new products will join the recently launched Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005, the next-generation tool for developers, to deliver a complete set of instruments for application building and Web authoring.

Good news for web developers, Windows platform, SharePoint collaboration. Bad news for commodity/cheap web hosting providers that have so far relied on RTR's ported version of Frontpage Server extensions to run FrontPage enabled sites and web bots on top of Linux and 8 other Unix platforms. There will be a lot of outcry from the hosting folks and people concerned that Microsoft is yet away locking away technology they previously opened but FrontPage extensions have been dead for quite some time. Honestly, not many will miss them, especially given all the cool stuff thats in SharePoint. So wake up folks, if you want to develop on the SharePoint platform you have to embrace the new technology, new dev tools and new way of doing things.