Appendix C. Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix

ASP.NET Web Matrix is a simple, lightweight development environment for building ASP.NET Web applications quickly and easily. Web Matrix was developed by a small group of people on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft in an attempt to reach out to the Web development community and experiment with new ideas and thoughts in the realm of Web development tools. Web Matrix is completely implemented in managed code by using C# and various technologies available in the .NET Framework.

Web Matrix contains a number of features that provide a rich design experience for creating Web Forms pages, user controls, and XML Web services. These features are described in the "Web Matrix Features" section of this appendix. Figure C-1 shows the Web Matrix development environment in Design view, and Figure C-2 shows this development environment in Code view when you work on an .aspx file.

Figure C-1. The Web Matrix development environment with a Web Forms page in Design view

Figure C-2. The Web Matrix development environment with a Web Forms page in Code view

As of this writing, the Technology Preview release of Web Matrix (version 0.5) is available as a small (just over 1 MB), free download from http://www.asp.net/webmatrix. You'll find additional information about the product and information about future updates at the same URL.