Inside ASP.Net Web Matrix

Alex Homer
Dave Sussman

During its relatively short but spectacularly successful life, Microsoft® Active Server Pages (ASP) has grown from a simple
scripting environment for creating dynamic Web pages into a powerful and easy-to-use platform for fully-fledged Web application
development. In its latest incarnation, ASP.NET, it provides a complete solution for building almost any type of interactive user
interface, as well as for implementing extensive back-end processing operations.
However, despite the many powerful features of ASP, choosing a comprehensive and usable development environment in which
to create ASP applications was never easy. Many third parties provide ASP support in their products, for example HomeSite and
Macromedia UltraDev (amongst others) support ASP 3.0, and, of course, Microsoft's own Visual Studio 6.0 included InterDev –
which was also available as a stand-alone product.
With the advent of .NET, support for ASP.NET development has been fully integrated into Visual Studio .NET. It provides an
extremely powerful and usable environment for ASP.NET development in the guise of Web Forms, as well as the more traditional
types of application (Windows Forms). And now Visual Studio .NET is joined by another Microsoft product, namely the
Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix Project (referred to from here on in as "Web Matrix").
At the time of writing, Web Matrix has just been released as a Beta 1 product. The whole nature of the Microsoft ASP.NET Web
Matrix project is that it will develop and grow based on feedback from the community that uses it, so the feature set will evolve
over time. You should also keep in mind that, as this is a Beta product, there are quite a few features that are not yet fully
implemented (so some things you may expect to see are missing).
However, even at this stage Web Matrix is an extremely usable and efficient tool, and certainly well worth installing and
experimenting with. In time, it will, without doubt, mature and be extended to provide many more of the features required for
building Web sites and Web applications using ASP.NET.
Over three sections this document will explore what Web Matrix is, what it can do, and how you can use it:
❑ Part 1 – What is Web Matrix? provides an overview of Web Matrix, looks at the features it provides, and the IDE it
contains
❑ Part 2 – Putting Web Matrix to Work walks you through using Web Matrix to build an application that contains many
different types of pages and resources
❑ Part 3 – Configuring and Extending Web Matrix demonstrates how Web Matrix can be configured to suit your
individual requirements, and extended by installing your own or third party add-ins

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