Scott Guthrie on Microsoft WebMatrix

Hola. Today we’re happy to share Scott Guthrie’s Foreword for Laurence Moroney’s upcoming book, Introducing Microsoft WebMatrix. (The book will be available in May.) Enjoy!

Foreword

It’s a really exciting time to be a web developer. The array of options that are available to you to be able to put your presence out there on the internet is better than ever before. With the coming emergence of the cloud, giving you global availability and infinite scalability, it feels like we are on the cusp of a new era in web computing.

The book in your hands is designed to get you started on this road. It will teach you about a new product that we at Microsoft are very proud of: WebMatrix.

With WebMatrix, you can easily get introduced to the wonderful world of open source applications. It makes it easy for you to acquire, install and configure websites using applications such as WordPress, DotNetNuke or Orchard. Traditionally, developers choosing to do this had to deal with the intricacies of installing and configuring these apps, making sure that they work on their server, or making sure that databases and database connectivity were properly configured on the client and on the server. WebMatrix is designed to abstract that plumbing away from you, and make it easy for you to have a File->New WordPress or File->New DotNetNuke experience.

Of course, if you don’t want to use someone else’s open source code, but want to build for yourself, WebMatrix also includes the brand new, and very exciting, ASP.NET Web Pages framework. This is a very simple, very light, but extremely powerful framework that allows you to build fully functional, data driven websites, quicker and more easily than ever before. And when you want to take the next step, and build massively scalable websites, the syntax (nicknamed ‘Razor’) is part of the ASP.NET MVC 3 release, and you can reuse your code and skills there.

WebMatrix v1 is just the beginning. With this book you’ll learn how to use it, and we hope to see you building the next generation of terrific websites and open source web applications using it.

Scott Guthrie
Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform