Thursday, September 06, 2012

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.

In last few weeks we have worked to make WebMatrix 2 available in 14 languages below:


English Italian Czech
German Korean Polish
Japanese Russian Port-Brazil
French Chinese-Simplified Turkish
Spanish Chinese-Traditional  

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:

image

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:

  • Accessibility:  Microsoft has pretty high bar when it comes to accessibility and the team spent quite some time in making sure the product is highly accessible.
  • Editor: Huge performance enhancements in editing of complex and big files.
  • Editor: Better detection of JavaScript errors within script blocks of any html files.
  • Editor: Formatting improvements on JavaScript Editor and enabling it to work more seamlessly with JSLint.
  • Editor: Making sure that we show function signature help in JavaScript editor.
  • Editor: Exposed extensibility points for Editor context menu.
  • FTP: FTP publishing improvements including sub-folder publishing and re-tries in case of failures.
  • Node.js: Code completion for Scoket.io for Node.js sites
  • Node.js: Code outlining fix-ups for SaaS editor
  • Node.js: Added a new template for package.json for Node.js sites
  • PHP: Support for the new short PHP tag.
  • PHP: Support for proper auto-completion for long PHP tags.
  • PHP: Support for detection of PHP/MySQL Apps when downloaded from a remote location
  • ASP.NET: Improved formatting of documents in ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor Syntax)
  • ASP.NET: Making Comment/Un-comment work nicely across different types of syntax (CSS, JS, HTML, Razor) within ASP.NET Web Pages file.
  • ASP.NET: Making C# colorization and intellisense more resilient in complex editing scenarios
  • ASP.NET: Proper validation for generic types in C# & VB editors
  • ASP.NET: Handling the nuances of Web Pages 1 vs. Web Pages 2 effectively
  • General: Support opening a random folder as a site in WebMatrix by right clicking on it in Windows.
  • General: Shipping RTW version of IIS Express, Web Pages, Web Deploy, SQL CE and every other component which makes WebMatrix 2 into a one stop shop for web development.
  • General: Making sure the product works seamlessly on Windows XP and beyond, both on x86 and x64 machines.

With all these improvements we hope you will have fun using WebMatrix 2 and will create more awesome website in time to come.   Here is once again a link to the download.

image

/*code awesomely */

Vishal

PS: We now have few WebMatrix team twitter handles which you might want to consider following@vishalrjoshi @justinbeckwith & @webmatrix

5 comments:

zeusnorris said...

Your place is valuable for me. Thanks!…

Anupam said...

I have heard that it has problems with VS2010, that VS2010 stops recognizing web pages.

Anonymous said...

Sadly, still no FTPS support. This means I have to keep using the heavyweight-and-relatively-ugly Expression Web tool for development.

Please... fix this? Or at least tell us how we could build a WebMatrix extension to do it ourselves?

-Lars

Jerry Foster said...

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.

Anonymous said...

I think the starter site template for web pages 2 in webmatrix is absolutely brilliant, it really saves a lot of time and money. I was just wondering if there are any updates/fixes on the way?
There seems to be few small bugs when resetting the password from
PasswordReset ?

I´m building new site based on the included membership/openId and I think it has been a little too quiet since the release of web pages 2?

When I´m starting a new site from a template does Webmatrix then check for latest versions of the specific template?

/Anders