7 Great WebMatrix Tricks & Tips Sites
We think WebMatrix is a pretty amazing tool and apparently we’re not alone as there’s about 700,000 mentions of it throughout the web today. We wanted to put together a list of great tutorials, tips and tricks that have been posted on the web and here’s our favorite 7 sites.
7 favorite WebMatrix Tricks & Tips Sites.
1. Bilal Aslam’s Common Errors & Workarounds
Bilal works as a PM at Microsoft and has posted a list of 5 common errors and their solutions on his blog. This ranges from “The application pool that you’re trying to use has the ‘managedRuntimeVersion’ property set to ‘v2.0’ to “Bad gateway: check proxy settings’ which are all pretty common errors today.
2. Charles Nurse’s Creating a DotNetNuke site and deploying it to a hosting account.
Charles actually has two blog posts the first one is WebMatrix and DNN – Using WebMatrix to setup your DotNetNuke Site. and the second is Using WebMatrix to Publish Your DotNetNuke Site. if you’re among the hundreds of thousands of DotNetNuke users you’ll find WebMatrix useful as you’ll be able to build your DNN site locally and test it completely within IIS and then publish it to a hosting account and have WebMatrix migrate the site files and database for you all auto-magically!
3. Ruslan’s Blog on IIS.NET – Installing PHP Applications with WebMatrix
Most PHP development is done on top of a windows desktop machine by PHP developers. However, they’re usually installing some Apache, MySQL and PHP stack on their machine and cluttering it up. With WebMatrix and it’s built in IIS developer express, you’re able to leverage it as a lean and mean PHP development machine and not only build and test PHP apps locally but deploy them and know they’ll work exactly as they did in development because you’re using IIS for both. Ruslan has a great tutorial using WebMatrix with PHP applications as well as a number of blog articles around PHP on Windows and the work Microsoft has been doing to make PHP run so well on Windows.
4. Mikesdotnetting – WebMatrix and jQuery Forms.
This is a great article that talks about leveraging jQuery and AJAX in ASP.NET WebPages (Razor). Mike’s actually taken WebMatrix and written a series of popular blog articles around Razor and WebMatrix including one on WebGrid.
5. From IIS.NET – Using the Command Line to run a WebMatrix site or manage IIS Developer Express
What I love about this article is that it gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of iisexpress and shows you how to do things like launching a site with a customer applicationhost.config file, running a site from another folder and even over port 80. Oh and if you’re not an avid fan of the command line, fear not.. They have an article on managing sites via the windows system tray too.
6. The ASP.NET Website’s list of video tutorials and articles on WebMatrix and ASP.NET WebPages (Razor)
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ASP.NET site’s WebMatrix resources. There’s a ton of information here from video tutorials to HTML tutorials.
7. From IIS.NET – Make your Website SEO Friendly
This article gives a great overview of the SEO capabilities of WebMatrix. It will tell you specific problems with your site that will impact your search engine rankings. Not only that, but you can run the same reports against your competitors to see how you stack up.
Only 7, Is that it?
So you’re probably thinking, what? 7 sites? that’s it. Well not entirely, but this is a beta offering and still very early in the process. There are some other sites I’d always recommend like ScottGu’s Blog and Scott Hanselman’s Blog. I’d also recommend checking out James Senior’s video about the OData Helper they’ve released for WebMatrix and how you can leverage OData. In James’s example he pulled a list of Netflix videos and displayed it with just a couple lines of code.
But hey, these are only the sites we found and I’m sure you know of others out there as well. So if want to comment with your favorite we’ll be sure to update the list.
