Microsoft’s WebMatrix, The Simple ASP.NET Editor
Remember the days of Classic ASP? You know when you could build an entire application in notepad and some simple VBScript? Then Visual Interdev came along and well 12 years later we have a mountain range of classes and Visual Studio 2010 along with other productivity tools to help us build web applications.
What if I said you could have all that simple freedom back to develop web sites? Well you can. Microsoft has just announced its latest web development platform and tool, Microsoft WebMatrix which utilizes the new Razor syntax.
There are several key audiences Microsoft is trying to appeal to with WebMatrix. In particular the PHP and Ruby crowds as well as new developers. The Webmatrix experience is designed to be a step up from the notepad development experience, but not overwhelming like Visual Studio can sometimes be.
My initial impressions have been really favorable. As seasoned as I am with Visual Studio I really like the simple approach with WebMatrix. One thing that I do find to be missing is no intellisense or auto-completion. So be aware of those missing features professional .NET developers are typically accustomed to using.
For more initial information please visit Scott Guthrie’s WebMatrix announcement post. Download the Beta release of WebMatrix from Microsoft. You can also view WebMatrix videos and tutorials on ASP.NET. I have several blog posts almost ready to go at the moment on how to accomplish things with WebMatrix. So please come back each day for these to be released.