Latest Microsoft Blogs

Did you notice the release of WebMatrix 2 ? WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool introduced in 2010 . It's focus is on simplifying the web development experience for ASP.NET and PHP, and more recently node. Rob Conery actually turned me onto WebMatrix and we use it for the This Developer's Life Podcast website. I recommend it for students, designers, and web pros that either don't need or don't want the whole Visual Studio experience. It's also a nice companion to Sublime Text 2. There's even Git extensions, LESS, easy deployment and more for the front end developer. If you want to download WebMatrix 2 and get started, it's free . It will use the Web Platform installer to install and you can use it...

On June 6th, I announced  RC version of WebMatrix 2.   I highly encourage you to read the post Announcing WebMatrix 2 RC as it covers most of the new features that we are releasing. I also encourage you to read ScottGu’s blog post which also calls out the key new highlights of  WebMatrix 2 RTW and visit www.webmatrix.com which has tons of user documentation. Since the June RC release we primarily focused on getting polish on the product and as part of this post I am hoping to highlight the key changes since WebMatrix 2 RC.  This post is not intended to be flashy but hopefully will give you an understanding of the effort that the team took in taking WebMatrix 2 from RC to RTM. In last few weeks we have worked to make...

I mentioned the Electric Plum Mobile Simulator as a nice way to check your site on an iPhone while using a Windows machine in my post called " Create a great mobile experience for your website today. Please. " Microsoft WebMatrix 2 RC is out this week and has a nice feature included - support for the Electric Plum Mobile Simulator for iPhone and iPad built right in. WebMatrix is Microsoft's lightweight editor for ASP.NET, PHP and node.js, as well the best way to install open source applications. It's a bit of a playground for the team. Features can be tried out in WebMatrix, and if they pop, we can move them into Visual Studio. I've been singing about Electric Plum for months, so I'm happy to see it in WebMatrix. Here's...

Yesterday you met open, unified, powerful yet simplified Windows Azure . You can read more about it on Windows Azure Blog or on ScottGu’s blog In the same spirit and as a great compliment to Windows Azure Web Sites, today I am super excited to announce the Release Candidate of our free web development tool WebMatrix. Background WebMatrix is designed to build modern standards based websites as effortlessly as possible. It aims to make your web development workflow easy i.e. · It lets you get started with Open Source web applications or with built in pretty templates like bakery, personal site, photo galleries, Chat application, Simple CMS etc. · It comes bundled with a web server so you do not have to configure anything on your machine. · It...

If I have to summarize in what is worth noting in WebMatrix 2 so far, here is how I would like to put it: Inspiring Environment – Web development is an inspiring task and I believe having an inspiring environment for it is important.  In WebMatrix we have always aspired to give web developers a polished and fresh environment to achieve mundane tasks.   Some interesting things worth noting in WebMatrix 2 from this standpoint are: App Install Workflow – We aspired to ask almost zero questions when you install an open source app like WordPress or Joomla.  We make the default choices for you and yeah we know that some of you want full control so we will enable that as well. Color Picker – Yeah you would think that what is the...

Soon after starting work on WebMatrix engineering, I got an opportunity to launch WebMatrix 2 Beta at //build .  For those who are not familiar with WebMatrix it is all in one web development tool which is inspirational as well as functional at the same time.  It is lightweight enough that you get a web development tool, framework, db, web server and more under 50MB and based on our testing it installs in around 2 mins on a 2GB RAM, Windows 7 machine with .NET Framework pre-installed.  Typically such tools cost $50-100 but WebMatrix is yours for free I was involved with WebMatrix 1 project which we launched on Jan 13th 2011 and it has only been few months since release of WebMatrix 1 that we have WebMatrix 2 Beta out. If you have...

I'm planning on updating the Hanselminutes.com website to look more modern and look more like this newly redesigned blog . Until then, one of the things I wanted to try was to update the application with some simpler code. The Hanselminutes podcast website is running the same VB.NET WebForms application it was on the day I started the show in January of 2006 (almost 300 episodes ago!) Sure, the app runs fine and there's no real reason to update it, but I wanted to see how quickly I could do it and if the code felt cleaner. There's a few requirements I need to make sure I don't miss: I'd like a new URL scheme. Currently showid is the database, not the logical "show id." Rather than http://www.hanselminutes.com/default...

Damain is a Program Manager Microsoft’s ASP.NET team and is responsible for WebForms and the WebForms Developer Experience In this episode I talk with Damain about the future of WebForms and it’s evolution, the inflewence of DynamicData on WebForms, code generation for ASP.NET WebForms and more. Resources Damian on the Web Damian on Twitter Listen [...] Read More...

Cyra Richardson is a Principal Program Manager Lead in Microsoft’s Server & Tools On-Line group and is primarily responsible for driving the strategy for almost all of Microsoft Developer and ITPro community properties. In this episode I talk with Cyra about the challenges and direction of Microsoft’s on-line communities. I once described Cyra as the [...] Read More...

Bjorn Rettig is the Director of Microsoft Developer Guidance. In this episode I talk with Bjorn about how he is growing and adapting Microsoft Developer Guidance to best meet Deverloper’s needs. Resources Bjorn on the Web Bjorn on Twitter Listen Subscribe MP3 WMA M4A Zune iPod Download 3GP iPod MP4 MP3 M4A M4V PSP WMV [...] Read More...