Earlier this week Microsoft released WebMatrix the new free lightweight web-stack for developing ASP.NET Web Applications.  As I discussed in my initial blog one of the potential uses of WebMatrix is its ability to open existing Open Source applications directly from the Web Application Gallery. 

In this blog post I will walk through the steps required to use WebMatrix to download and install DNN on your local machine.  In a future blog post I will show how you can then publish your site to the web, using Web Matrix’s publish option.

Once you have downloaded and installed WebMatrix from - http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/download/ you will be able to launch it from your Windows Start menu. 

On startup you are presented with the following screen (Figure 1)

Figure 1 – The WebMatrix Startup Screen

As we are intending to create a DNN site we will select “Site From Web Gallery”  Clicking this link will bring up the dialog shown in Figure 2

Figure 2 – Selecting an Application from the Web Gallery

As you can see DotNetNuke is the default selection – this is because it is the application with the highest number of downloads.  We will keep this default and select “Next”.  We are then presented with the EULA (End-User License Agreement) (Figure 3) which you will need to accept by clciking the “I Accept” button.

Figure 3 – Accept EULA

Once you accept the EULA WebMAtrix will begin downloading DNN from the Web Gallery (Figure 4)

Figure 4 – Downloading DNN

Once DNN has been downloaded from the Web Gallery, you will be able to click the “Next” button, where you will be presented with the configuration screen.  This is where you enter parameters that will allow WebMatrix to create your database for you.  In this case I enter the following parameters (Figure 5).

Figure 5 – DNN Configuration

• Database Server – (local) – for my default instance of SQL Server 2005/2008 – I could also enter the machine name of the computer
• Database Name – DNN_WebMatrix - the name I am going to use for the database
• Database User Name – the name of a user to create in SQL Server that will be used to connect to the database
• Database Password – the password for the user
• Confirm – confirm the password for the user
• Database Administrator – the username for the Database Administrator (for most default installs of SQL Server this will be sa)
• Database Administrator Password – the password that was used for the Administrator when SQL Serve was installed

Once you have entered the information – click “Next” to allow WebMatrix to create the Database for you.  In addition to creating the database WebMatrix will also set up your connection string in your web.config file.

WebMatrix will then show you its start up screen.  Note that the files were automatically saved in the path “D:\My Documents\My Web Sites\DotNetNuke® Community Edition” and the URL for the application is “http://localhost:44796”.  IIS Developer Express like the Visual Studio Web Server (Cassini) uses port numbers for each site.

Figure 6 – WebMatrix after creating your new DNN Application

Now we have downloaded DNN we are ready to launch DotNetNuke’s own Install.  We can select Run and choose one of the installed browsers (Figure 7).  Later, especially when making changes to skins etc. we can use the “Open in all browsers” option to launch all installed browsers at once and compare how the site displays in different browsers.

Figure 7 – Launch the DotNetNuke Web Install

You will be immediately presented with DNN’s Install Wizard (Figure 8).  And when I say immediately I mean just that.  The startup appeared to be quite a bit faster than launching DNN as a full blown IIS Application.

Figure 8 – The DNN Install Wizard

You can install DNN as you would in any other situation.  I chose the Auto option and after about 20-30 secs I was able to redirect to the home page of my new site (Figure 9)

Figure 9 – The Completed DNN Install.

So that’s it.  In less than 5 minutes from start to finish I was able to install DNN on my local machine using WebMatrix, the Web Gallery and IIS Developer Express.  In future blogs I will review some of the features of the WebMatrix IDE and how to publish my completed site.

In previous blogs I went out on a limb and made some predictions.  While I picked Holland and Spain to win their groups I honestly didn’t think that the final would be contested by these two European teams.

I am pleased that whoever wins, there will not only be a new World Champion – but the champion will be a country that has never been champion before.

When the Quarter Finalists were determined and there were 4 South American countries (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay), 3 European countries (Germany, Holland and Spain) and one African country (Ghana), I was thinking that it was looking like a Brazil v Argentina final.  European teams had never won the World Cup outside Europe, and while Brazil had failed to impress, they have a habit of success and Argentina seemed to be in good shape.

But Germany and Holland played great games to beat Argentina and Brazil respectively – the Germans being especially impressive.  Uruguay did get through to keep South American interest, but Spain beat Paraguay fairly comfortably for all three European teams to advance to the Semi-Finals.

The Dutch then beat Uruguay in a game where the final result of 3-2 didn’t really show how the Dutch dominated, and Germany ran out of steam allowing Spain to go though to the final.

So who will win this all European contest. 

Spain have played good solid football, but they really haven’t clicked yet.  Without Torres in the semi-final they dominated possession but didn’t really look like scoring for long periods of the game – and needing an excellent headed goal from a corner to win 1-0. 

Holland have managed to keep their egos in check and work effectively as a team.  They are not as good as the team of the 70’s (Cruyf Neeskens et al) which lost 2 World Cup finals or the Team of the 90s’ (Bergkamp, Kluivert, de Boers et al) which played beautiful football but failed at the semi-final level in many tournaments.

I think this is Holland’s year.  It would be really depressing for the Dutch to lose a third World Cup final, and their support is strong in South Africa.  Either way I am hoping for an entertaining game between Europe’s two top teams (based on Fifa’s current rankings).

Earlier today Scott Guthrie announced a new “Web Stack” called WebMatrix.  WebMatrix is both the name of the complete stack (Web Server, Database and View Engine) as well as the name of the new lightweight development tool that you can use to create, edit and publish websites.

In this quick review, I propose to briefly describe the components that make up the WebMatrix stack and to highlight where these pieces relate to DotNetNuke (DNN).

What is WebMatrix?

There are four major components to the new WebMatrix “Web Stack”

1. IIS Developer Express – a new free lightweight web-server, based on IIS 7, that runs on all versions of Windows and does not require Administrator level permissions
2. SQL Server Compact Edition – a lightweight file based database that is simple to set up and free to download.
3. ASP.NET “Razor” – a new  view-engine option for ASP.NET that can be used to easily embed C# or VB code within an HTML page. This is “bin” deployable and free.
4. WebMatrix Tool – a free lightweight developer IDE that integrates all the components.

Did you notice that all the pieces were free?

What is the purpose of these new technologies?

One of the main challenges with the current Windows based “Web Stack” (WINS – for Windows, IIS, .NET, SQL Server) is that it requires significant investment of dollars and is aimed at the more sophisticated developers.  In comparison the equivalent Linux “Web Stack” (LAMP – for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is much cheaper in dollar terms – all components are available free, and therefore more approachable for beginner developers.  In addition there is a large suite of open source php applications which are ready to run. 

Enter WebMatrix - all components are free and are installable on any Windows Computer.  In addition they are also compatible with the more sophisticated (and expensive) components which make up the current Windows “Web Stack”.  Developers can learn on this platform and transfer their skills onto the more complex platform later.

WebMatrix also helps a second category of developers – people who want to download Open Source Applications (like DNN), make some minor changes and publish their site.  The WebMatrix developer IDE can open an application directly from the Windows Web Application Gallery.  In Scott Guthrie’s post today he shows this – and in the second screenshot you can see DotNetNuke as one of the applications that can be opened/downloaded.

Where does DNN fit in?

I will leave it to others more qualified than me to discus how WebMatrix and DNN fit “strategically”.  But what about from a technology perspective.

• The ability of the WebMatrix tool to open an Application directly from the Web Application Gallery is really kinda cool, and if you combine this with its ability to publish to a remote server, I can see this being used by a lot of people to download DNN, make some changes whatever they might be and publish their modified site to a hosting environment.  Currently we don’t have an easy story for this scenario.
• The Razor View Engine is kinda cool and is a new approach to combining markup (HTML) and code (C# or VB).  Can we make DNN modules using CSHTML or VBHTML pages.

In future blogs I will delve deeper into these technologies.  In the meantime you can read Scott Guthrie’s blogs which I linked to above. 

On a personal note, if you want more detail on the new Razor parser, check my son Andrew’s blogs.  As many of you know Andrew was a past DotNetNuke Core Team member, and for the last 9 months has been working at Microsoft on the new Razor parser.