Why not make ASP.NET Web Matrix shared source?

27. March 2007
Comments (4)

ASP.NET Web Matrix was the Free ASP.NET editor back in the .NET 1.x days. The tool is actually still available for download. The other day, I was thinking...

Why doesn't Microsoft make ASP.NET Web Matrix available as Shared Source?

Web Matrix was a really cool tool, and it's obviously been rendered obsolete by Visual Studio Express. However, there are still alot of really cool things done in the code, and I think it would be beneficial to the community if the source code were made available.

So, I decided to email Scott Guthrie (I only chose him because I have no idea who else might have the correct authority to possibly make this happen.) the basic description and question stated above.

Within a day I got the following response from ScottGu:

That is a good question. I will send some mail to the team to inquire whether we could make this happen.

Thanks,

Scott

Now, we can all wait and see if it'll happen. Hopefully there isn't too much "secret" proprietary code within Web Matrix that prevents Microsoft from releasing it under a Shared Source license.

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Comments

Brennan Stehling
Brennan Stehling
3/27/2007 6:57:00 PM #
How about open sourcing MS Frontpage too? Smile

My guess is that within 5 years we will see Visual Studio opened up much like is done with Eclipse. I think it could follow the model they used for ASP.NET AJAX and official support the core functionality while endorsing several shared source components.
Mandar
Mandar
3/29/2007 12:36:00 PM #
I will also be waiting for that but that will really help to customize own aspx page editor embedded in desktop application

mascix
mascix
9/28/2007 7:06:00 AM #
I was looking for same question so is there a open source web matrix ?
Ian
Ian
11/25/2007 4:49:00 AM #
If they could make Web Matrix work with dot.net 2 and 3 as well as SQL 2005, I'd use it over VWD.  VWD's sqldatasource control methods of DB access far inferior to Web Matrix's function builders.  Those were great.  I can't believe the VWD team didn't include them.  It was a huge disappointment.  I have to write that stuff by hand now and I hate it.  
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