WebMatrix Aims to Ease Web Development

WebMatrix, now available as a public beta, is a new free integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft, designed to streamline the process of building, testing, and deploying small to medium-sized Web applications. The WebMatrix environment, which mainly targets small development teams, hobbyists, and students, incorporates a new developer Web server based on IIS, a new version of SQL Server Compact, and the new “Razor” coding syntax engine, all of which could reduce the burden of developing and deploying Web sites. WebMatrix supports ASP.NET and PHP and provides migration paths to Visual Studio and SQL Server.

Centralized Site Development, Publishing, Monitoring

WebMatrix is offered through Microsoft’s Web Platform site, a portal launched in 2009 to create a tighter community around Microsoft’s Web development platform by offering a focus for tools and applications. The WebMatrix IDE, a vastly simplified alternative to Visual Studio (VS) and Expression Web, presents a user interface divided across workspaces, which break Web site development into tasks such as coding, working with databases, configuration, monitoring, and publishing to a live Web server. (For an illustration, see “WebMatrix IDE“.) Although a free version of VS called Visual Web Developer Express is also available, WebMatrix has a much smaller footprint, is more task-oriented, and could speed the process of modifying existing sites, at the expense of eliminating advanced features such as a complex project system, user interface designers, and tool palettes.