When I started learning about Web Pages I followed several of the Microsoft tutorials, all of which utilized WebMatrix. I did this until I realized that WebMatrix offered no debugging. Wait? What?? No way. And I quickly moved my Web Pages development to Visual Studio. While there were some things that I thought were nicely done in WebMatrix, I have found nothing that I cannot do in in Visual Studio. Also, unless someone who knows better than me enlightens me, I am vehemently against developing the same project with two different IDEs; It just seems like an unnecessary risk to me.
Nevertheless, I would like to ask for your thoughts/insights about this. I am very curious to know if any of you use them in tandem and, if so, what aspects of each do you utilize the most? And, of course, does it cause problems?
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The idea behind WebMatrix is that it provides a lightweight experience for web developers. Debugging is one of those features we think belongs in Visual Studio 🙂 As far as things you can do in WebMatrix that are different, most of them center around the App Gallery, PHP, and Node.js. We have a bunch of stuff that makes it easier to work with PHP/MySQL apps, and the next release has a node.js experience. All of the experiences around ASP.NET Web Pages are available in VS as well.
You can’t really hurt anything by using both at the same time. If you’re doing ASP.NET and you’re comfortable with Visual Studio, there’s really no reason to keep using WebMatrix at the same time. Let me know if you have any other questions 🙂
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