As a web designer and developer who spends his day developing and troubleshooting web designs in ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET MVC, and Orchard CMS, I really appreciate the web developer tools being integrated into the various browsers. In Firefox 11, Mozilla continues to push the envelope with a new style editor and 3D DOM Viewer. This is in addition to the really nice inspector and JavaScript Scratchpad introduced in the previous version of Firefox.
Microsoft released a preview of a number of new technologies and developer tools at the Microsoft Build Conference. As of today I have successfully installed Windows 8, Visual Studio 2011, WebMatrix 2, ASP.NET MVC 4 and all the related developer tools and technology stacks that come with them. As a Microsoft .NET Developer and Microsoft MVP it is always great to get early access to Microsoft development tools and technologies. I am excited about them all, but I want to focus first on WebMatrix 2, which offers a lot of interesting new features for web developers interested in developing small business websites. WebMatrix 2 is not just a website editor, but a stack of technologies offering end-to-end website development and deployment services. You get HTML, CSS, and JavaScript editing and intellisense, database development tools for SQL Server and MySQL, integration with Nuget, remote website publishing and editing, reporting on SEO and website health, ASP Web Pages and PHP Scripting, starter websites and templates, and a whole gallery of CMS, Blogging, and other applications like Orchard CMS, Umbraco, Joomla, WordPress, and DotNetNuke out-of-the-box! Let's discuss some of the new features in WebMatrix 2!
