WebMatrix 3 VS Visual Studio 2013

Question

Are the sites/apps created in WebMatrix directly transferable to Visual Studio OR are there libraries that ONLY WebMatrix provides/utilizes? Will a site created in WebMatrix work without any massaging in VS? Also, is there an ideal workflow for using both tools or is it one or the other?

Answer 1

In general, an ASP.NET ¹ based website from WebMatrix should be usable in VS with little or no changes. VS Website projects will include all folders on disk into the project.

Projects that are based in other languages, such as PHP or Node.js, will not be supported in VS out of the box. There are 3rd party VS extensions available to support these, and I'm assuming they'll work just fine with a WM based website as well, but it will depend on the extension. Some libraries might be easier to acquire with WM if they're in the templates, but you should be able to share them without any problems.

Any VS Web Application Projects (ie with a .csproj or .vbproj) will not work in WebMatrix. This includes project types like MVC and WebAPI.

I can't comment much about a workflow utilizing both, as I've really only used VS. I think it mostly depends on what features you prefer in each one. The WM team put a lot of effort into creating a simpler user experience, and they have some better integration with, for example, Azure Websites, or SQL Compact Edition if you use those.

¹ : This includes sites with plain client code in HTML/JS, as they do not require server runtime integration.