It all starts with WebMatrix...

We are spoilt for choice with three of Microsoft’s top web platform advocates coming to New Zealand next year. Scott Hanselman will be returning to New Zealand in February to speak at Webstock in Wellington. Seats are still available to attend his session "ASP.NET MVC: From Baby Ninja To Slightly Older And More Competent Ninja"at the Wellington Town Hall on Wednesday 15th of February. WebStock delegates can register for a special price, but if you're not going to the conference you can register just for Scott's workshop. If you do, you'll learn about MVC with Dependency Injection, jQuery techniques and Templating, Mobile Views with jQuery Mobile, Custom Scaffolding, how to make hybrid WebForms/MVC apps (and when!) and find out about powerful NuGet packages like Glimpse and MiniProfiler, and how to make realtime apps with SignalR.

Then in March, Damian Edwards and Phil Haack will be presenting sessions at Codemania in Auckland. Both are Senior Program Managers on the ASP.NET team and, whilst Phil's session has yet to be announced, Damian will be presenting the brilliantly-titled "SignalR: It's realtime, it's async, it's websockets, it's all .NET & it's all awesome". Will all this web loving, I thought it was time to write another web-based editorial with a twist.

Since the launch of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer there have been almost two million downloads of the five most popular applications. Believe it or not, it all starts with WebMatrix. WebMatrix has matured beyond being the lightweight IDE that introduced Razor, IIS Express and SQL CE to the world. Scott Hanselman has written a cool post on WebMatrix and node.js: The easiest way to get started with node on Windows. I also recommend that you watch a great session from BUILD, WebMatrix: uber geek in designer clothes.

This made me curious to find out a bit more about what applications modern web developers are using to build for the web. This afternoon I tried my hand at installing and testing out some of the most popular applications in the gallery. I have written about the six apps that I tried and have provided some more information about which apps web developers in New Zealand are using most often. Take a trip over to my blog to read more...

Thanks, Nigel.

Nigel Parker
Technology Evangelist
Microsoft New Zealand
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