Chapter 1
Getting Started with WebMatrix
What you will learn in this chapter:
- What WebMatrix is all about
- How to acquire and install WebMatrix
- How to create a simple site with WebMatrix
- Where to go within WebMatrix to get things done
- What file types you are likely to be working with
- How to structure a website
In the early days of web development on the Windows platform — in the 90s of the last decade — Microsoft offered a relatively simple and approachable technology, now referred to as Classic ASP, which enabled inexperienced web developers and even non-programmers to build simple websites. Getting started with Classic ASP was easy; all you needed was a text editor and a hosting account to run your site. With the release of ASP.NET and Visual Studio .NET in early 2002, the web development landscape changed considerably. Although extremely powerful, ASP.NET is not easily approachable, and certainly not so for non-programmers. It has a pretty steep learning curve and requires experience in programming. The tool used to build ASP.NET websites — Visual Studio — is also a lot more complex to use than a simple text editor. In addition, it takes a fair bit of time to download and install Visual Studio.
Although the advent of ASP.NET and Visual Studio addressed the needs of experienced and professional programmers and was generally seen as a major leap forward, Microsoft no longer had a good option for people starting out with web development. To accommodate this group of users and ...
