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Microsoft WebMatrix

What is in WebMatrix?

WebMatrix is a 15MB download (50MB if you don’t have .NET 4 installed) and is quick to install. The 15MB download includes a lightweight development tool, IIS Express, SQL Compact Edition, and a set of ASP.NET extensions that enable you to build standalone ASP.NET Pages using the new Razor syntax, as well as a set of easy to use database and HTML helpers for performing common web-tasks. WebMatrix can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.

Note: Razor support within ASP.NET MVC applications is not included in this first beta of WebMatrix – it will instead show up later this month in a separate ASP.NET MVC Preview - which will also include Visual Studio tooling support for it.

Getting Started with WebMatrix

WebMatrix is a task-focused tool that is designed to make it really easy to get started with web development. It minimizes the number of concepts someone needs to learn in order to get simple things done, and includes and integrates all of the pieces necessary to quickly build Web sites.

When you run WebMatrix it starts by displaying a screen like below. The three icons on the right-hand side provide the ability to create new Web sites – either using an existing open-source application from a web application gallery, from site templates that contain some default pages you can start from, or from an empty folder on disk:

This post was written by: Saumya Aggarwal

Saumya Aggarwal is a professional blogger, web designer and marketer. Follow him on Twitter