When the first version of Macromedia's Dreamweaver hit the scene in 1997, it was a pretty big deal. My group of Web designer friends worked ourselves into a state of frenzied excitement over the shiny new development application. Emails were exchanged. Phone calls made. Conversations began with "Have you tried Dreamweaver yet?" or "What do you think of Dreamweaver?" or "Dude... Dreamweaver!" We tormented each other with picks of that silly song on the jukebox at our favorite bar. Good times!

Yet that first release of Dreamweaver was far from perfect. Some of us even developed a love-hate relationship with the program. Love it like a cute little sister, hate it like a clumsy younger sibling who's always breaking your perfectly good code. If you've ever had to spend a few hours cleaning up after an early generation WYSIWYG application's supposed "helpfulness," then you can attest to the pain of developing outside of BBEdit.

But things did improve. Since those early days, Dreamweaver has become the industry-standard editor for most Web design shops, Flash houses, or departments dealing with HTML in the corporate world. Nary a job interview for a Web-related position passes without the ubiquitous, "Do you know Dreamweaver?" Heck, they even teach Dreamweaver at universities. And now the latest release, Dreamweaver MX, is even more robust.

Part of the fully integrated Macromedia suite of Studio MX Web content creators, Dreamweaver MX is a sleek, well-rounded tool that covers all aspects of professional Web design and Web application development. Dreamweaver MX is set up to handle everything — blogs, shopping carts, surveys, message boards, .NET applications, media sites, and just about anything involving mark-up languages.

In the pages that follow, we'll be diving into these new features, taking a close look at the ways that Dreamweaver MX hopes to make Web development even easier than ever before.