As someone who believes we need to provide a better offering for beginners and non-professional developers, WebMatrix, and specifically, the Razor syntax is a huge leap forward. Given that most customers are familiar with HTML and JavaScript, being able to have a concise, lightweight and easy-to-use language (that still has the power of the full .NET Framework) is huge.

In some sense, it’s a return to the simplicity of Classic ASP for building Web pages.

Here’s why I think it’s cool:

• A Full Web Stack: WebMatrix gives you the full stack, including IIS Express, SQL Compact Edition, deployment tools, and SEO reporting tools
• Perfect for Beginners: If you’re new to ASP.NET or even new to coding, you can build a Web site using Razor in a weekend.
• Hoster-friendly: You don’t need any special configuration for Razor syntax pages and even SQL Compact Edition just needs to be x-copied to your bin folder. The one hoster requirement is that they have the .NET Framework 4.0 installed
• Content Helpers: Similar to VB’s My static classes/methods or Popfly’s blocks, Content Helpers wrap API’s, handy features, 3rd party services and much more.

Here’s a Channel 9 video with two of the guys behind WebMatrix: Scott Hunter and Simon Calvert.

Aside: The name WebMatrix isn’t actually new, it’s the same name of the tool that existed before Visual Web Developer Express that was solely for Web development.

Sources: Internal site (brandtools) and the Microsoft Trademarks Web site.

Last updated: April 27, 2010

Caveats

These guidelines don’t apply to URLs (ex: www.asp.net) or to code –namespaces, variables, and classes should follow the .NET Framework naming guidelines.

This list only covers capitalization/spacing rules, it doesn’t cover the correct usage of (tm) or ® symbols or the correct word usage rules. For those, refer to the trademark Web site.

Also note that I have no idea why we are so inconsistent say on keeping features/brands two words versus one word or the order of product/version/year.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• We're also doing the full length interviews with all of the participants that will be posted over the next few weeks

We're also going to be doing a screening at PDC on Monday from 6:30 - 7:30 PM so mark your calendars.

While this post was originally written in 2009, it still gets a ton of hits!

Today, we have lots of new offerings for developers looking for free tools including Visual Studio Community Edition and updated Visual Studio Express Editions. I've updated the page with relevant links below

• Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition

Snip from the FAQ on that page:

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?            
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

 Visual Studio Express 2013 Editions are also available from https://msdn.com/express

• Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web - For ASP.NET or HTML/CSS/JavaScript
• Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows - Windows Store or Windows Phone
• Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop - Console, WPF, Windows Forms or C++/Win32

Snip from the Express page

Commercial use of Visual Studio Express
Visual Studio Express products are available at no charge and may be used for commercial, production usage subject to the license terms provided with each product. For example, you can use Express for Windows to create apps that you can then submit for sale in the Windows Store.

 And here's how they talk about Community Edition

Visual Studio Community is a free and full-featured IDE for building apps for Web, Windows Store, Windows Desktop, and even Android and iOS using programming languages including C#, C++, HTML/JavaScript, and Visual Basic. With Community, you can take advantage of out-of-box advanced productivity features such as enhanced code editing, code analysis, debugging, and profiling, and extend that functionality with over 5,000 free and paid extensions in the Visual Studio gallery. Community is the perfect tool for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.

Dan’s picks

• Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp (Mark Russinovich, Arun Kishan)– I’ll be setting up some projects during this time, but it would be great to go to this workshop. Note that this is FREE and you don’t have to be registered for PDC to go to it.
• Building Live Media Viewing Experiences using IIS Smooth Streaming (Vishal Sood) – We’re looking to add Smooth Streaming to Channel 9 so any details on the programmability would be appreciated, plus seeing how they did the NFL player will be interesting
• Code Contracts and Pex Go to a NerdDinner with ASP.NET MVC (Manuel Fahndrich, Peli de Halleux) – How to take an existing application and apply Pex for parameterized unit testing and code contracts for improved static checking
• Visual C# IDE Tips and Tricks (DJ Park) – As I used to give this talk back in the day, it’ll be interesting to see how it’s evolved for Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft AJAX Library, jQuery and Visual Studio 2010 (Stephen Walther) – How VS 2010 will make building AJAX apps better
• ASP.NET MVC 2: The New Stuff (Stephen Walther) – ‘Nuff said
• How Visual Studio 2010 was built with WPF 4 (none listed) – This should be a great talk for anyone who wants high performance WPF and that has a legacy Win32 code base
• Dynamic binding in C# 4 (Mads Torgersen) – Everything that I’ve seen about C# 4.0’s dynamic features makes me fall in love all over again
• Networking and Web Services in Silverlight (none listed)– Interested in the “server push” pattern mentioned for scenarios like real-time chat
• Introduction to SQL Server 2008 R2 StreamInsight (Torsten Grabs) – I know nothing about StreamInsight, but it’s a “platform” for processing data over real-time events (with LINQ) so I’m thinking a Twitter or Facebook scanner Coding4Fun project would be great for this
• Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic (Luca Bolognese) – Luca is always an amusing speaker and I’m sure this will be a fun session
• Advanced Diagnostics, Historical Debugging and Test Automation (Habib Heydarian) – Speaking of entertaining speakers, Habib’s session on cool new testing/debugging features for VS 2010 is another can’t-miss session.
• Silverlight Roadmap and Futures (Karen Corby) – Your first look at Silverlight 4
• Developing Advanced Applications with Windows Azure (Steve Marx) – Steve always builds cool demos (like faking how to be a CIA agent) and I’m sure this talk won’t disappoint
• Windows Azure Present and Future (Manuvir Das) – As I haven’t played with Azure yet, this should be a great place to start and to see their roadmap for the future

What PDC sessions are you most excited about?

- Step-by-Step instructions on Coding4Fun

- Project on MSDN Code Gallery

You can download any shared games, whether they’re your games or community built games.

Kudos to Ben Anderson and Adam Nathan for building the tool :)

TweetCraft Overview

TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for World of Warcraft. TweetCraft has two major components:

• Windows client - A Windows client utility that sends/receives messages from Twitter & TwitPic
• Warcraft Addon - A Warcraft AddOn that sends/receives messages from Twitter

Key Features

• Send/receive Tweets in-game
• Upload in-game screenshots using TwitPic
• AutoTweet Warcraft achievements
• AutoTweet when you log in, enter an instance or change zones
• TweetCraft is also extensible so that AddOn authors can build custom AutoTweet messages

More Information

• Blog/Twitter friendly URLs: https://ch9.ms/TC or https://ch9.ms/TweetCraft
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Getting Started Guide
• Coding4Fun article on how TweetCraft works
• Extending TweetCraft

Screenshots

WPF Client

TweetCraft In-Game

TweetCraft Client Close-up

Hey folks, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for the world to download and here's your cheat sheet of links you'll want to know about

• Download: Visual Studio Team System Beta 1, Web installer, VSTS Beta 1 ISO, .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 
• Readme: VSTS Readme
• Installation Tips & Tricks: Be sure to watch Brian Keller's 10-4 episode on how to download & install VSTS Beta 1  
• Key Features: If you want to see what features are available in Beta 1, check out Jason Zander's VS Beta 1 blog post for tons of screenshots or watch previous episodes of the 10-4 Show on Channel 9 for everything you ever wanted to know about VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0.
• Support Forums: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1
• Bug Reporting and Suggestions: Visual Studio 2010 on Connect
• Training Materials: Drew and team have posted the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit that works with VSTS Beta 1. This includes coverage of:
• New language features including VB, C#, F#,
• .NET Framework features like: Parallel extensions, MEF, WPF, WCF
• Data features: Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services
• Web development with ASP.NET 4.0

Top Two Installation Questions 

Q. Will it work side-by-side with VS 2008? 
A: Yes, Visual Studio 2010 will work side-by-side with VS 2008

Q: Will it work on Windows 7?
A: While installing on Windows 7 Beta is not a recommended scenario, installing on Windows 7 RC is a tested scenario.

One thing to remember is that VS 2010 is not feature complete and hasn't been optimized for performance. While the move to a WPF-based editor is pretty sweet, there are some scenarios where you may feel a little bit of latency with your commands.  You'll see perf improvements on this over time.