Microsoft WebMatrix

» see microsoft.com/web/webmatrix as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 13 January 2011 Microsoft released a stack of free web tools at once, and WebMatrix was the friendly one. It bundled IIS Express so you did not have to configure a web server, SQL Server Compact so you did not have to install a database, and the new Razor syntax so a page could be mostly HTML with C# dropped into it. You could also point it at the Web Gallery and have WordPress or Drupal running locally in about a minute, which was a genuinely strange thing for Microsoft to be shipping.

The target was the person between a hosting control panel and a real IDE. Someone building a site for a club or a shop who knew enough HTML to be dangerous and had no interest in solution files. Version 2 arrived on 6 September 2012 with Node.js support and mobile emulators. Version 3 arrived on 1 May 2013 and added Git, GitHub and one-button publishing to Azure, at which point it stopped being a beginner's tool and started being a small tool for people who already knew what they were doing.

Then Microsoft built a different editor. Visual Studio Code went public in 2015, ran on Linux and macOS as well as Windows, took extensions from anyone, and did not care what language you were writing. Against that, WebMatrix was a Windows-only application with a fixed idea of what your project should look like. Microsoft announced the discontinuation in 2016 and ended formal support on 1 November 2017. The installers stayed downloadable for another five years out of inertia and were pulled on 31 December 2022.

This part of the industry was never mine. I write against cameras and hardware, in C++ and Python, and the Microsoft web stack was a country I have flown over rather than lived in. I know exactly what WebMatrix was for because I have watched people fight the alternative, which was FTP into a shared host and edit the file in place and hope. Something that made a local server appear without a config file was solving a real problem, just not one I ever had to have.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was for ~

The honest description is that WebMatrix was FrontPage's grandchild with better engineering underneath. Same promise, that a person who is not a professional developer should be able to make a working website, and a much more serious answer to it: a real web server, a real database and a real templating language rather than a WYSIWYG grid pretending to be a page.

Its problem was that the promise had a shrinking audience. By 2013 a person who wanted a website for a shop used a hosted site builder and never touched a file. A person who wanted to learn went to a text editor and a tutorial. The gap in the middle that WebMatrix was designed for closed from both sides while the product was still being updated.

~ the day it died ~

Nothing happened on 1 November 2017. The application on your machine kept working, because it was a desktop program and had no server to switch off. What ended was the promise that anyone at Microsoft would fix it, and the announcement went out on the IIS blog rather than anywhere a WebMatrix user would be reading.

The pieces outlived the container. IIS Express is still in Visual Studio. Razor grew up into the syntax behind ASP.NET Core and Blazor. SQL Server Compact went into the ground alongside it. What is gone is the specific arrangement where all of it arrived together in one free install, ready, with nothing left to decide.

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