If you are a web developer or developer wannabe, you soon will find out there are multiple different stacks of technologies underline for a simple and ubiquitous web app. Depends on what technologies you choose to build your apps on, just setting up the environment required for a web app to run would be enough hassle.
Microsoft just released WebMatrix 2, it’s a freeware designed to simplify your work as a developer. It’s a one click solution for you to try out different web technologies, designed and optimized for pure web development.
It supports most of the popular framework and technologies out there, including WordPress, Node.js, ASP.NET etc. You can literately start a new app in just few seconds with few clicks. It’s really awesome if you want to build a quick app or try out different frameworks etc.
Example Setting Up an eCommerce Site in One Minute
Web Matrix 2 is awesome, it gives you a list of templates if you want to build from scratch of use some of the existing open source freeware from the App Gallery.
For example, let’s build an eCommerce site. All you need to do is go to the App Gallery, go to eCommerce section and pick a framework. Web Matrix 2 will take care of all the required technologies for you, if you don’t have it installed, it will install for you.
It gives you some description on what this app is about and what framework it was leverage on.
Install any dependency, in this case, looks like we will be need ASP.NET MVC 3 and some of the other tools in order to run this.
Once you app is finished installing, you will see it’s running on a new browser. Web Matrix also comes with an IDE where you can edit the source code of the running application.
Woha, with just a few click now you have an eCommerce website running locally. It’s as easy as this to publish to a public site.
I personally love the Web Matrix 2, it has a lot up side. Looking forward to using it in any future developing for sure ! Check it out if you are interested.
Thanks! I was planning on moving a WordPress blog to a new server and this gave me the opportunity to quickly check out my transfer procedure. My next trick will be to check out the WebMatrix support for mobile devices using the iPhone/Windows phone emulators.