Web Matrix 2 Released To Web - Still Free, Still Awesome

Microsoft Web Matrix 2

"WebMatrix is a free and lightweight web development tool. Create, publish, and maintain your website with ease.

Optimized for Open Source

Install popular web apps with a few clicks, customize them easily with app-specific code completion, and publish them quickly to the web. Learn More

Designed for Top Languages

Create websites using our ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, or HTML5 templates, and take advantage of the latest web standards, emerging standards(CSS3, HTML5), and popular JavaScript libraries such as JQuery.

Built for the Cloud

Deploy your websites to and from Windows Azure Web Sites with a single click, edit them remotely or even download directly from the cloud.

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Vishal Joshi's Tangent  - WebMatrix 2 is Released

On June 6th, I announced  RC version of WebMatrix 2.   I highly encourage you to read the post Announcing WebMatrix 2 RC as it covers most of the new features that we are releasing.

I also encourage you to visit www.webmatrix.com which has tons of user documentation.

Since the June RC release we primarily focused on getting polish on the product and as part of this post I am hoping to highlight the key changes since WebMatrix 2 RC.  This post is not intended to be flashy but hopefully will give you an understanding of the effort that the team took in taking WebMatrix 2 from RC to RTM.

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The goal for the RTW release was not to add a ton of new features but to actually make only targeted changes to make your experience with the product even more awesome and raise the quality even more.  We had given “Go-Live” license with the RC release already but now hopefully there would be nothing stopping you upgrading from WebMatrix  1 to WebMatrix 2.  JFYI: we will soon turn on the “Upgrade” flag in WebMatrix which will prompt millions of users using WebMatrix 1 to move to WebMatrix 2.

WebMatrix 2 in my opinion is one of the best light weight web development tool out there.  With support for Node.js, PHP, ASP.NET, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, SQL CE, SQL Server, MySQL, FTP, Web Deploy, Less, ScSS, Coffee Script, SEO, iPhone/iPad simulators and many many other features there is no doubt that it is probably the best web editing tool that one could possibly get for FREE, so if you are not already using it I hope you give it a try by downloading it below:

Since WebMatrix 2 RC we fixed over 100 bugs, many of them reported on Stackoverflow and user voice. Thanks for the taking the time to report issues, and helping us make WebMatrix 2 even better.  Below are some notable fixes that went in between WebMatrix 2 RC and RTM:

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Nice to see the continued work on Web Matrix. Now to really impress me, they need to start working on v3 now... (oh and change the cadence to a more agile one... [well you can always hope...] :)

Anyway... If you're doing web dev and looking for a great tool that free, this is a must go to tool.