The Fundamentals of WebMatrix

Earlier this week Scott Guthrie announced the release of WebMatrix – a new developer tool and development stack based off ASP.NET. I’ve been playing around with WebMatrix and the new view engine called Razor by experimenting with an upcoming jQuery rating control from Infragistics as well as building a personal website.

WebMatrix is simple to use and and Razor syntax is a lot of fun, but when learning something new it’s nice to have some docs handy. One of the goals that the ASP.NET team had with the release of WebMatrix was to have a rich set of documentation to accompany the release. Going beyond help files, what they are providing is more of a book than traditional toolset or framework documentation. Here are links to each chapter:

  1. Getting Started
  2. Coding with Razor Syntax
  3. Creating a Consistent Look
  4. Working with Forms
  5. Working with Data
  6. Working with Files
  7. Working with Images
  8. Working with Video
  9. Adding Email to your Website
  10. Adding Social Networking
  11. Analyzing Traffic on your Website
  12. Adding Caching for Faster Websites
  13. Adding Security and Membership
  14. Introduction to Debugging
  15. Customizing Site-Wide Behavior
  16. ASP.NET Web Pages API Reference
  17. Visual Basic Language and Syntax

A book, in fact, is exactly what they are calling it. If you are interested in a slimmed-down path to web development for quick sites and people just getting started in web development then WebMatrix and this book may be perfect for you. 

There is only one problem – every book needs a cover! So I cracked open Photoshop and imagined this:

Getting Started with WebMatrix Beta

Note: The "stack" image is courtesy of the WebMatrix product page.

Who knows... maybe it’ll make its way to official website? ;)

2 Comments

  • Wow, that looks pretty horrible. I hope that the examples are just the usual marketing fluff to show how easy it is, and not intended to be how apps are actually written in this thing. Reminds me of the worst parts of PHP and ASP, before folks started understanding how to apply good separation of concerns to web development.

  • why oh why didn't they include an EF lite or a super simple ORM is beyond comprehension. Sql in 2010?

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