ASP.NET Web Matrix

ASP.NET Web Matrix, whose name was the inspiration for WebMatrix, was released in 2003 and later discontinued by Microsoft in favor of Web Developer Express, a free version of Visual Studio's web development functionality; Visual Studio is Microsoft's flagship IDE for all aspects of Visual Basic and C# coding, including ASP.NET development.

What had changed by 2010 was the existence of a number of open source projects offering PHP and ASP.NET site templates and Content Management Systems that could be used by non-programmers to build and maintain rich web applications. Microsoft WebMatrix provided a development environment to help facilitate these emerging styles of website creation.

The original ASP.NET Web Matrix was a free tool released by Microsoft for the rapid development of web applications intending to run on Microsoft servers supporting ASP.NET server-side technologies. It was a managed application written in C#, Microsoft's principal programming language.

ASP.NET Web Matrix grew out of a pet project started by Nikhil Kothari. Originally conceived as a test bed for working with ASP.NET controls in a designer environment, the ASP.NET team saw a number of benefits for a tool of this type, including the creation of an Integrated Development Environment that could act as a lightweight alternative to Visual Studio. The project was developed into a product (originally code-named "Saturn") that was released in the summer of 2002 as a free download on the www.asp.net Web site, without official support (only community support) and with only word-of-mouth marketing. The original release supported only Microsoft SQL Server, which was bundled with Web Matrix in the form of MSDE, a desktop version of the database engine. A subsequent release of Web Matrix ("Web Matrix Reloaded") in June 2003 included support for Microsoft Access .mdb files, which simplified deployment.

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