WebMatrix 2 RC - HTML, CSS, Node.js, ASP.Net, Coffee, {Less} and so much more and still free...

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT)'s WebLog - WebMatrix v2 RC is out so it is time to revive this blog

"It has been a long while since I posted here. I've been silent since most of the things I've been working on were not public. NowWebMatrix v2 RC is out I can admit I have been working on most of its editor features: JavaScript, Node.js, HTML, CSS, {LESS}, SaSS, Jade, EJS, Classic ASP and so on. I am going to start series of posts on WebMatrix editor functionality, its relation to Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express and so on. WebMatrix v2 employs the same WPF based core editor surface that first appeared in Visual Studio 2010. This allows us to share features between VS, VWD and WebMatrix.

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53 Bytes - Node.js meet WebMatrix

After months of hard work by the WebMatrix team, it’s exciting to introduce the release candidate of WebMatrix 2. WebMatrix 2 includes tons of new features, but today I want to give an overview of the work we’ve done to enable building applications with Node.js.

If you want to skip all of this and just get a download link (it’s free!), here you go.

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Enter WebMatrix 2

Today, getting started with node.js is a relatively simple task. You install node, npm (which is now bundled with the node installers), and get started with your favorite text editor. There are infinite possibilities, and limitless configurations for managing projects, compiling CoffeeScript & LESS, configuring your production settings, and deploying your apps. WebMatrix 2 sets out to provide another way to build node.js apps: everything you need to build great apps is one place.

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Vishal Joshi's Tangent - Announcing WebMatrix 2 RC

WebMatrix is designed to build modern standards based websites as effortlessly as possible. It aims to make your web development workflow easy i.e.

• It lets you get started with Open Source web applications or with built in pretty templates like bakery, personal site, photo galleries, Chat application, Simple CMS etc.
• It comes bundled with a web server so you do not have to configure anything on your machine.
• It has top notch support for web & industry standards like HTML5 , CSS3, JavaScript & jQuery
• It supports server side scripting of your choice - may it be ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js
• It will have built in database management tools for SQL Server or MySQL
• It also has SEO tool & performance optimization tools.
• Finally, it has great publishing tools whether you are using FTP/FTPS or Web Deploy. And now it supports publishing to Windows Azure too!!

Essentially right from getting started till publishing, WebMatrix will make your life easy and will do so for FREE. What is nice is that even after all this it continues to be lightweight installs under 2 minutes (assuming you have .NET 4 which most machines do today).

Not to get lost in the noise, WebMatrix 2 RC was made available last week. Great to see Microsoft continue to invest in this tool and on it's new features, I have to say, "Wow"...

 

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WebMatrix v2 Beta is out...