Introducing Microsoft WebMatrix (IIS Developer Express,ASP.NET Razor, SQL Server Compact)

There was a time initially when Microsoft has released the ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1, they have released a free ASP.NET development tool called ASP.NET Web Matrix. I remember doing lot of fancy stuffs with it. My initial days i had a craze about that thing. Pretty awsome doing development with it, light weight

Web Matrix grew out of a pet project started by Nikhil Kothari. It was originally conceived as a test bed for working with ASP.NET controls in a designer environment. The ASP.NET team saw a number of benefits for a tool of this type, and used it to try out a variety of additional ideas for creating an IDE that could act as a lightweight alternative to Visual Studio. The project was developed into a product (originally code-named “Saturn”) that was released in the summer of 2002 as free download on the www.asp.net Web site, without official support (only community support) and with only word-of-mouth marketing. The original release supported only Microsoft SQL Server, which was bundled with Web Matrix in the form of MSDE, a desktop version of the database engine. A subsequent release of Web Matrix (“Web Matrix Reloaded“) in June 2003 included support for Microsoft Access .mdb files, which simplified deployment.

Web Matrix included a number of features that made it an appealing alternative to Visual Studio 2003:

• It was a comparatively small download and was fast and easy to install.
• It was specific to Web applications, thus avoiding some of the complexities required in Visual Studio to support the different tools, languages, and application types in Visual Studio.
• It used a folder-based model, rather than the project model used in Visual Studio. (For more information, see Scott Guthrie‘s blog entry VS 2005 Web Project System: What is it and why did we do it?.)
• It did not require design-time compilation into a single deployable .dll. Instead, developers could deploy the source code for their ASP.NET pages and rely on ASP.NET to dynamically compile the pages on first request.
• It included a small Web-server tool (“Cassini”) that ran on the local computer and enabled the developer to test ASP.NET Web pages without requiring Internet Information Services. This feature made it appealing to developers who could not run IIS due to corporate policy or because they did not have a version of Microsoft Windows that includes IIS.
• It included FTP support, rather than requiring FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE). This feature made it a practical development tool for hobbyists and students who could develop and test on their own computer, and then deploy their files to a hosted server.
• It was free.

Many of these features were incorporated into Visual Studio 2005, and the Web Matrix style of web application development became the default. The success of the Web Matrix project, both in terms of features and in the appeal to the community of a free IDE with a limited feature set, also helped the Visual Studio team decide to release free lightweight versions of Visual Studio 2005—Visual Web Developer Express Edition for Web development, and similar Express versions of Visual Basic, C#, and SQL Server.

Later for a while we didnt hear about WebMatrix… Suddenly microsoft yesterday July 7th announced the availability of their new web development suite called Web Matrix. Ohh!! I felt is n’t that old Web Matrix or a new flavour lets see.

The NEW Shiney – Microsoft WebMatrix Web development suite

WebMatrix combines the three products revealed last week by ScottGu—IIS Developer Express, SQL Server Compact Edition, and ASP.NET “Razor”—with a new lightweight development environment. The new tool integrates support for these products, to provide streamlined deployment to the development web server, database management, and page creation. To this it adds built-in support for publishing to a range of hosting providers, libraries to automate common tasks, and a repository of open-source web applications that can be downloaded and incorporated into a project automatically.

IIS Developer Express gives developers a standalone version of the IIS 7.5 web server that ships with Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Traditionally, ASP.NET developers have had to choose between the convenience of Visual Studio’s ASP.NET Development Server, which runs as a regular user account and has easy deployment integration with Visual Studio, but which lacks the full range of IIS’s features, or the version of IIS that ships with their version of Windows. For developers on Windows XP this is particularly problematic, as the version that ships with that operating system does not correspond to any “real” server version. With IIS Developer Express, developers can develop against, and test on, a web server that’s fully compatible with the full IIS 7.5 server, but which retains the ease of use and convenience of the ASP.NET Development Service.

SQL Server Compact Edition 4 provides a SQL Server-compatible database that requires no installation and which uses regular files to store its data. The database engine itself within the web application; when that is stopped, so is the database. Just as with IIS Developer Edition, this enables development without the use of Administrator accounts or the administrative burden of using “real” SQL Server. Both versions promise the ability to migrate to their respective “regular” versions with no code changes necessary. SQL Server Compact Edition has been around for some years; version 4 marks the first release that’s suitable for use in multithreaded server applications.

ASP.NET “Razor” is a new templating language for ASP.NET, designed to be simpler and more streamlined than traditional ASP.NET development. The first release of WebMatrix does not include Razor; it will ship in an update in the coming months.

The WebMatrix development environment ties these things together. Pages can be written using ASP.NET (or, when released, Razor), then deployed to IIS Development Express for testing. WebMatrix can be used to inspect and alter database tables and data. When ready, the project can be deployed using FTP or Microsoft’s Web Deploy infrastructure to a production environment or third-party hosting.

PS: You have to download  Microsoft Web Platform Installer 3.0 BETA to install Web Matrix in your PC.

I really welcome and celebrate announcement of such a nice package. 🙂 . This is just an information sharing blog.

Information Courtesy : Wikipedia , Ars Technica