I’ve walked through how to create a new Web site using an open source application within the web gallery.  Let’s now look at how we can alternatively use WebMatrix to do some development of a custom site.

The two right-most icons on the WebMatrix home-screen provide an easy way to create a new site that is either based on a simple template of pages, or an empty site with no content:

Let’s click the “Site From Template” icon and create a new site based on a template.  We’ll select the “Empty Site” template and name the site we want to create with it “FirstSite”:

When we click the “ok” button WebMatrix will load a site for us, and display a site overview page that contains links to common tasks:

Let’s click either the “Files” icon in the left-hand navigation bar or the “Browse your Files” link in the middle overview-screen. Selecting either of these will show us the file explorer.  The “Empty Site” template actually does have one file in it by default – a file named Index.cshtml.  We can double-click it to open it within the WebMatrix text editor:

Files with a .cshtml or .vbhtml extension are ones that use the new “Razor” template syntax that I blogged about last week.  You can use Razor files either as the view files for an ASP.NET MVC based application, or alternatively you can also use them as standalone pages within an ASP.NET Web site.  We are referring to these pages as simply “ASP.NET Web Pages” – and you can add them to both new projects as well as optionally drop them into existing ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based applications.