Microsoft WebMatrix Final Drops on January 13, 2011

Microsoft is less than a month away from wrapping up WebMatrix a solution offered to simplify the development and deployment of websites on top of Windows.

The way I see it, WebMatrix is designed to draw developers away from LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) to the software giant’s technologies, including Windows Server, IIS, SQL Server, but also the alternative to open source PHP, ASP.NET.

In this regard, the Redmond company has packaged IIS Express, ASP.NET and SQL Server Compact into WebMatrix.

What this means is that WebMatrix features a web server, as well as a web framework and an embedded database, namely everything that developers need to build sites on top of Windows.

WebMatrix is currently still in Beta, but the Redmond company is extremely close to finalizing development.

According to Ilya Vorobiev, from Microsoft Russia, the final version of WebMatrix will be released officially on January 13th, 2011.

At this point in time, a pre-release version of the solution continues to be available for testing.

WebMatrix Beta 3 has been introduced in early November 2010 and will offer developers a taste of what the final version will bring to the table.

“One of the goals of WebMatrix is to make ASP.NET more approachable for people who are learning web development for the first time and they want to build dynamic web pages; so people who are maybe familiar with HTML, might know a little bit of CSS and want to build dynamic web pages,” explained Microsoft’s Ken Casada.

“As a professional developer you may find WebMatrix interesting as well, for instance for quickly building your own web site or a web site for a friend; for the typical “quick&dirty” solution…you don’t have much time and you just need things done.

“Another target for WebMatrix are all those developers who just want to build a web site starting from an existing open source application framework, like DotNetNuke or BlogEngine.NET, all developers who just want to take one of those existing applications, customize it and deploying it without having to worry too much about the details.”