Microsoft WebMatrix: what is it?

Question

I'm a little confused about new Microsoft products. I'm a classic webform Asp.Net developer. I know exists also Asp.Net MVC with a different approach based on Mvc pattern. Now, i know exists also WebMatrix that uses new Razor "notation".

Can someone explain me what are the main difference between that "technology" ? When use WebMatrix, when WebForm ? Thanks!

Answer 1

Webmatrix is a platform that integrates a variety of recently released technologies such as IIS Express, Asp.Net Webforms, Razor, SQL Express etc. I guess from what I have been reading it's a way that eases the barrier to entry, for non-MS developers, into the MS world. In addition you can also use code your site in PHP and use a variety of open source tools for developing web sites. To directly answer your question, in you planning on creating a complex web application, WebMatrix may not be the solution you're looking for.

As a reference, I suggest reading through Scott Gu's Introduction to Webmatrix

WebMatrix will be able to take advantage of these technologies to facilitate a simplified web development workload that is useful beyond professional development scenarios – and which enables even more developers to be able to learn and take advantage of ASP.NET for a wider variety of scenarios on the web.

If you are a professional developer who has spent years with .NET you will likely look at the below steps and think – this scenario is so basic - you need to understand so much more than just this to build a “real” application. What about encapsulated business logic, data access layers, ORMs, etc? Well, if you are building a critical business application that you want to be maintainable for years then you do need to understand and think about these scenarios. Imagine, though, that you are trying to teach a friend or one of your children how to build their first simple application – and they are new to programming. Variables, if-statements, loops, and plain old HTML are still concepts they are likely grappling with. Classes and objects are concepts they haven't even heard of yet. Helping them get a scenario like below up and running quickly (without requiring them to master lots of new concepts and steps) will make it much more likely that they'll be successful – and hopefully cause them to want to continue to learn more. One of the things we are trying to-do with WebMatrix is reach an audience who might eventually be able to be advanced VS/.NET developers – but who find the first learning step today too daunting, and who struggle to get started.

Answer 2

If someone is still interested: a pretty good lessons here http://habrahabr.ru/company/microsoft/blog/136004/ . This link is for those, who understand russian. Shortly speaking WebMatrix allows you to conveniently mix up C# server code and html (this mixing is provided by simple Razor sytax). Also in WbeMatrix 2.0(beta version now) is provided full IntelliSense for html/css/c# code.