Today Shaun Walker and I had the pleasure of demonstrating how well DotNetNuke works with Microsoft WebMatrix and the new Razor scripting engine at CodeMash. CodeMash is a great regional development conference that focuses on exposing developers to a wide variety of languages and platforms. A common theme throughout CodeMash has always been how we can simplify our development processes without loosing power and flexibility. WebMatrix and Razor
As you saw with the Razor scripts that were submitted as part of our recent Razor Hackathon, it is possible to build a wide variety of modules and scripts using Razor. As you probably saw in the announcement during the WebMatrix launch event at CodeMash, DotNetNuke 5.6.1 Release Candidate is now available for immediate download from the DotNetNuke CodePlex download page. The Release Candidate contains the final RTM version of the Razor engine and we expect the final DotNetNuke 5.6.1 version to ship next week on January 19th.
With the new Razor Host module it is easier than ever to add new functionality to your website. This is perfect for the administrators who have a little bit of scripting and html experience, but who may not need all the capability provided by Visual Studio or who may not have a more formal developer background. Scripts can be created and edited directly in the Razor Host module and published live on the site in just a couple of minutes, all without installing anything on their local machine. If your host administrators have access to a web-browser then they can build and publish scripts for your site.
Sometimes, you will need a richer editing environment than that provided by the Razor Host module. For those instances it is easy to open your site with Microsoft WebMatrix where you have a much nicer Razor editing experience. Once your scripts are finalized you can copy the file to your production site, or just use the Razor Host editor and copy and paste your changes into a script file that is already on the server.
We are very happy to have partnered with Microsoft for this launch event and believe that having Razor as a core component of DotNetNuke will provide great value to our users now and into the future.