Quiz: Is WebMatrix Right for You?

Last week I published a few posts on WebMatrix and Razor. The first was a preview of a jQuery Rating Control in WebMatrix with Razor from Infragistics and the other was a fun post displaying my imagined  cover  for the WebMatrix book.

I was a little disheartened though when I got this comment on one of the posts:

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.

Now to be honest when I read the first line, I thought he was saying my design was horrible, but then I realized that he just didn’t get the intent of the WebMatrix effort. My guess is that this is the kind of guy I'd like to spend a couple of hours talking shop. I can tell from his passion that he's an accomplished developer who cares deeply about the quality of guidance and frameworks/tools that are made available to the developer community. The thing is these new tools aren't intended for him and in all probability, WebMatrix is not for you.

WebMatrix is a stack and tool for folks just entering the ASP.NET development arena. The hope is WebMatrix will provide an easy on-ramp to the enterprise worthy frameworks for the those new to the party. WebMatrix is more concerned with you learning the fundamentals than allowing you to effectively separate the concerns of your application, unit test every aspect of your site or create an n-tier solution.

So I thought what better way to illustrate the point than with a silly little quiz to help guide the way! With all apologies to The Oatmeal, I present to you:

1 Comment

  • I think you are correct. Anyone who is a professional web developer should steer clear of WebMatrix, but I can think of a couple of people I know who it will be perfect for. Will they create the best architected applications. No. Does it matter, not really, it's just designed to get them going. Just as you avoid the fine details of engine tuning to a learner driver, avoid telling a learner programmer about separation of concerns, unit testing, multi-tiered architectures and all that stuff. It will just confuse and ultimately dishearten them. They just want a web page.

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