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Meet WebMatrix, Microsoft’s New Suite For Painless Web Development

Michael Calore — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:21:58 +0000

Microsoft has unveiled a new all-in-one web development suite called WebMatrix.

It’s more than an IDE or a framework, it’s a whole suite — a web server, a SQL database, and a database-ready framework, all wrapped up into a single development environment that makes it easy to build, test and deploy some fairly complex web apps.

WebMatrix is free, and it’s available for Windows users as a beta download.

The new suite is especially geared towards developers building web apps that require local data storage. It’s pretty flexible, and you can also use it to build simple websites, then scale up to something mid-weight or incorporate a full-scale app that you could run a business on top of.

The WebMatrix suite is made up of three components: the lightweight Windows-based web server called IIS Express, SQL Server Compact Edition, a simple database server, and Razor, a new templating language based on ASP.NET. The beta version you can download today actually doesn’t have Razor, but it will be included in a future release “later this month,” according to Microsoft.

The three key technologies were previously announced by Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s VP of its Developer Division. Now, with the launch of WebMatrix, Guthrie has introduced a few new components.

Central to the WebMatrix experience is the Workspace. It’s is basically a singular dashboard inside the app where you develop your site, deploy files, perform various admin tasks, run SEO tests and generate analytics reports.

There’s a web apps gallery that attaches to Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer, so you can browse and install all sorts of open source packages or content management systems like Drupal, Joomla and WordPress. There are also several templates and frameworks included, so if you need some CSS behaviors or you want to include JQuery interactions, all of those elements can be integrated into your workflow. The ones that aren’t included can be downloaded. You can test your app by automatically launching any of the browsers you have installed on your system.

WebMatrix has been built to let you start out very simply — you can just use it to run a WordPress site if you really wanted to — and then scale up to database-driven web apps. If you install something that requires a MySQL database, WebMatrix will even download and install MySQL for you.

It’s probably not going to eat into the user base of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s full-featured IDE for building apps across the entire Windows platform. But it’s so simple and fluid, it could very well draw some Windows-based developers from the LAMP stack over to the Windows IIS stack. Since everything is integrated — the dev environment, the frameworks, the app gallery and the web server — it’s really meant as a one-stop shop for building a site from scratch.

As a bonus, the files generated by WebMatrix are all just simple text files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL and ASP code. So if you want to take all the work you do within WebMatrix and move it over into a different IDE of your choosing, or even a text editor, you won’t end up unnecessarily confused. Anything generated by WebMatrix can also easily be imported into Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer Express 2010, one of Microsoft’s other free tools for building web apps.

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Use Master Pages in ASP

Webmonkey Staff — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:45:47 +0000

It may be geeky to refer to anything programming-related as “kick butt.” If it is, you can call me a geek.

And you can quote me, too, because Master Pages in ASP.NET 2.0 are soooo kick butt.

Before I entice you any more, it’s important to know the system requirements. The .NET framework needs Windows 2000, XP, or 2003. Microsoft has plenty more information about the .NET Framework 2.0.

And if you’d rather use PHP, you can read Get Smarty, an article about PHP’s templating engine right here on Webmonkey.

Back to Master Pages. Master Pages let you templatize your website, separating content from design. Some reasons you might want to use a template:

Make global changes whenever you want across your entire site.
Never edit every page of your site just to change the logo.
Maintain a consistent look and feel without going nuts.

Let’s get started on Master Page mastery. I can’t promise a black belt, but you’ll surely make it to orange. And, as my seven year old nephew could tell you, orange is definitely kick butt.

All you need is to not be afraid of basic HTML. That’s your white belt.

Ready? Ki-yai! Let’s get started with ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages.

First things first, check out this simple template we’ll be using:

<%@ Master %> Karate Chop

This will show up on every page

Save this as Master.master.

This should look a lot like a basic web page. It is! There are a few unfamiliar elements:

<%@ Master %>

This first line tells the server that this is a Master page.

This is a normal HTML tag, but the runat="server" part is thrown in there so the server will look at the stuff inside of it first. In particular, this will allow you to change the title on each page. But more about that later.

The final new element is a special ASP tag:

This tag is at the heart of Master Pages. It says, “Content goes here and I’m going to call it ‘mainstuff.’”

This page is useless without actual content. The Master Page is like a Karate uniform — It holds the basic structure, but it needs help to do anything. Time to give it that help by adding some content. And since you’re a yellow belt now, we’ll move a little faster. Let’s do it.

Contain your content

Now that we have a Master Page, let’s give it some content. Here’s an example content page:

 <%@ Page MasterPageFile="Master.master" Title="Why are Karate belts colored?" %>



 

 Karate belts are colored the way they are because

 the same belt used to be used over and over.

 Every time you moved up a level, you dyed your

 belt a darker color.

Save this as Content.aspx.

Very simple. Not even one line of HTML and only two elements:


<%@ Page MasterPageFile="Master.master" Title="Why are Karate belts colored?" %>

This line tells the server where to find the current page’s Master Page. It also passes along the title of the page. That runat="server" in the tag of our Master Page does the trick here. Without it, the title would still be “Karate Chop.”

The rest is the content, contained inside this tag:

The ID is a unique identifier which can be just about anything. ContentPlaceHolderID matches the asp:contentplaceholder ID in our Master Page.

Together, they give us this page. View source on that HTML file to see the meat of our Master Page.

Go ahead and try editing the text. Changes to the content show up in the end result. Copy Content.aspx to a new file, MoreContent.aspx, and change its content. Both pages inherit from the single Master page.

If you make some changes to the Master page (such as the copyright notice), those changes come through in both content pages. This is was templating is all about. Pretty nifty, eh?

You can add additional content sections, such as a sidebar. To do this, you’ll just want to place this line in your Master.master file:

And this in your Content.aspx file:

 

 Here is some sidebar content

Of course, to do tricky things like make the sidebar float to the side, you’ll need to dig into CSS a little bit.

And, naturally, there is more to learn about Master Pages, but you’ve begun your long journey toward mastery. You’ve earned your orange belt, just like I promised. You aren’t chopping boards in half with your bare hands yet, but you’re on your way.

And, at least you won’t have to change a logo across a couple hundred static pages.

Microsoft Steers Developers to Ajax Roadmap

Adam Duvander — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:26:45 +0000

In an effort to improve its Ajax features in ASP.NET, Microsoft announced its Ajax roadmap. The document lays out new features, many of which are available in third party JavaScript frameworks.

Among the most exciting proposed features slated for the next version are DOM manipulation APIs, which make it easy to access any elements in a web page. The company also plans to translate some server-side controls to be accessible via client-side calls. For example, a templating control could retrieve data from the server and place it into a page based on a local template without refreshing.

On the list of nice-to-haves, Microsoft includes animation and drag & drop. These popular features are a major part of effects libraries such as Scriptaculous, Moo and JQuery.

Developers attempting to use non-Microsoft tools have long had difficulty fitting in with the ASP.NET framework. For example, ASP.NET changes the ID of any server-manipulated page element. The DOM features alone in the proposed update to Microsoft’s Ajax tools will simplify client-side access.

Some web purists may criticize Microsoft for not working to support third-party JavaScript frameworks. The company has long forged their own path with ASP.NET and to their credit each version is better than the previous.

If you want a peak at what the code will look like in the future version of ASP.NET Ajax, download the roadmap.

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