When Written: Aug 2010
My last article about simple ways to build web sites ( see PcPro Issue 192 ) certainly created a lot of positive emails. There seems to be a desire out there for easy to use web design tools, but there is such a large number of these that making a choice is tricky.
Microsoft has just re-entered this arena with a free download web programming tool called WebMatrix (http://www.asp.net/webmatrix) which is very different to the previous product with this name that disappeared when Web Expressions appeared. This version is a strange beast as there is no attempt at providing a design view; the only way of seeing what your work looks like is to preview the site in a browser, which as we all know is the only reliable way of doing so anyway. But this ‘working blind’ will not appeal to many. Even when it comes to writing style sheets or coding there are no style builders, nor any of the great intellisense help that most of us have come to rely upon, correcting our mistyped coding.
Whereas in the last article I showed how Xara Web Designer made the creation and design of a web site so easy with almost total extraction from having to use HTML, where you drag and drop your design objects on the page and Xara converts this into HTML as you click the ‘publish’ button, WebMatrix from Microsoft has gone the other way. It seems that they have thrown away all attempts at making things easier for the web builder. So why even bother with the download of Web Matrix? I wouldn’t recommend that you do except to preview a new web programming language from Microsoft called Razor.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton