Introducing the ASP.NET Web Matrix
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“Unfortunately, no one can tell you what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.” But seriously, this article is an introduction and overview to the Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix Project, although this is an application that you should see to really appreciate.
In a nutshell, the Web Matrix it is a complete ASP.NET application development environment that can be used to create anything from individual HTML or ASP.NET pages, to complex web services and end-to-end applications.
It is still just in release 0.6 and is literally a project undertaken by some members of the ASP.NET team in their spare time. It is an experiment, and what the development team hope will be a two-way process of interaction between developers. The team has set up a kind of bartering system of us telling them what we want and them building it into future releases. Using the Public as elements of your UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and QA (Quality Assessment) phase in this way is an excellent idea as you are never going to artificially create a control group as diverse and as brutally honest as the developer and user community as a whole.
There are apparently still some bugs in the current release, and parts of the application behave a little differently from what some of the online documentation states, but I haven’t seen any major problems yet. It is basically a fully working, yet completely free application.
Users of Visual Studio will feel very much at home when using the Web Matrix, as it is very similar in look and feel to Microsoft’s application development suite; in fact, it could almost be just an extra profile within Visual Studio. It is as if the developers took all of the ASP.NET related features from Visual Studio, then added a whole load of extra related functionality and packaged it up into a separate application. That is how good it is.
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