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Web Matrix World Ready

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WebMatrix has generated a lot of interest. It is a free tool that allows you to create, customize and publish websites. It’s easy to use, supports multiple platforms and the tool is free from Microsoft. You can download it from www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix.

Since our blog mainly focuses on the international features of Microsoft products, I started to search for international features of WebMatrix. I didn’t find much, so I thought that this is a good topic for our blog.

So far, Microsoft has shipped WebMatrix in the following UI languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Polish, Turkish and Brazilian Portuguese.

When you download WebMatrix you are directed to Web Hosting gallery; this is the same for all UI languages of Webmatrix. However, there are tools available for finding hosting providers based on geography or currency. You can Bing to find your favorite tool. :)

When you create a new website based on online template, the templates’ language depends on the WebMatrix UI language. For example, in Japanese UI will you have Japanese templates.

 

The same framework methods that are available to you in MVC or Web Forms applications are also available in ASP.NET Web Pages. This includes all of the classes for resource loading and all of the classes in the System.Globalization namespace.

You can change the encoding of a response programmatically in the same way you would in Web Forms. The following code works in both frameworks:

               

          Response.ContentEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("GB18030");

 

The only major feature introduced is a simple way to set Culture and UICulture in a simplified format. The following code will set the Culture and UICulture on the thread that generates the response to fr-FR and fr, respectively:

  @{

         Culture = "fr-FR";

         UICulture = "fr";

     }

Similarly, if you want the same behavior that the Culture=”Auto” setting on the Page directive gives you in ASP.NET, you can write:

  @{

         Culture = "Auto";

         UICulture = "Auto";

     }

If you are a PHP user, I’m not an expert but I assume that all the international features would also follow in the same manner. 

 I need to thank the Web Platform and Tools team’s Clay Compton for helping me in this post. :)