Starting Web Development with Microsoft WebMatrix

Posted on Thursday, April 28, 2011

Microsoft's Developer Guidance team has just released Starting Web Development with Microsoft WebMatrix on MSDN.

WebMatrix provides a fast and easy to use environment for creating interactive web sites using a simplified scripting code and syntax, combining the power of server-side .NET managed code execution with client-side technologies such as jQuery scripting. However, this guidance is not specific to just WebMatrix; it describes general techniques and provides information that will be useful to all new web developers. It will certainly give customers a try/buy experience whereby they can evaluate if it will handle the types of projects they are interested in developing.

This guidance is designed to help developers just starting out with Microsoft WebMatrix. It provides a series of exercises that take you from downloading the tools all the way to creating cool websites, including:

• How WebMatrix provides a complete development environment for building websites and web applications that incorporate server-side code (code that runs on the server to create the HTML pages that visitors see in their browser).
• How you can generate HTML and other content in your pages using server-side code.
• How you can specify the styles, colors, and layout for the content of your site using style sheets.
• How you can use a database to power your website. This includes displaying stored information to visitors and collecting input from visitors that you store in the database.
• How you can support specialist types of browsers (called user agents) that are designed to make it easier for visually-impaired visitors to use the web.
• How you can add client-side code that runs inside the visitor's browser to make the pages you display more interactive, and to reduce network traffic between the browser and your server.
• How you can identify visitors and store information specific to each one that personalizes the website for them, and allows specific sets of visitors such as administrators to interact with the site in different ways.
• How you can use the useful helper classes included in WebMatrix to reduce and simplify the code that you need to write.