If you’ve not yet used WebMatrix, what are you waiting for?!?!?!? you’re missing out on a great IDE that helps you get a web site up and running in very little time. Whether you’re coding your site in PHP, Node.js, or ASP.NET, WebMatrix has you covered with all sorts of great features. One of the awesome features of WebMatrix is the number of templates it has baked in. Starter templates for any of the languages it supports are available, as are a number of practical templates for things like stores, personal sites, and so on. As of the latest release of Windows Azure Web Sites, all the awesome WebMatrix templates are now also available in the Web Sites application gallery. Below, you’ll see a screen shot of the web application gallery, with the Boilerplate template selected.

I wanted to let you know about an event I’ll be speaking at in early April. Along with my good friend and mentor Scott Hunter, “el master’o’ASP.NET,” I'll be presenting at the Web Camps in Dallas, Texas. I’d love to see you there.

I’ve been asked a lot of great questions about Windows Azure Web Sites since the feature launched in June. Things like on-premise integration, connecting to service bus, and having multiple environments (like staging, production, etc), are all great questions that arise on a pretty regular cadence. With this post, I’m going to kick off a series on solving real-world problems for web site and PaaS owners that will try to address a lot of these questions and concerns. I’ve got a few blog posts in the hopper that will address some of these questions, rather than just cover how certain things are done. Those posts are great and all (and a lot of fun to write), but they don’t answer some real-world, practical questions I’ve been asked this year. Stay tuned to this area of my site, as I’ll be posting these articles over the next few weeks and probably into the new year. As I post each of these solutions I’ll update this post so you have a one-stop shop to go to when you need to solve one of these problems.

This week we announced support for nopCommerce in the Windows Azure Web Sites application gallery. Using the Windows Azure portal and with requiring zero lines of code, you can set up nopCommerce on Web Sites and get your online store up in minutes. You’ll have your very own products database, shopping cart, order history – the works. On the nopCommerce web site you can learn a lot more about the features nopCommerce offers. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to get your own store up and running on Windows Azure Web Sites.

Next week I’ll be speaking at the Web Camps events in India. The web camps series, put together by my trusty teammate Jon Galloway, offers web developers a glimpse into all the new web-related stuff the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams have been cooking. I’m looking forward to the trip, as I’ve never been further East than Sweden. My team has this habit of coming up with nifty out-of-office emails so I decided to make a map, originally thinking I’d jam the map into an email. The image ending up being pretty huge so I’m sparing the team the extra room in their mailboxes by sharing it here instead.

The third post in the Solving Real-world Problems with Windows Azure Web Sites blog series I’ll demonstrate one manner in which a web site can be connected to an on-premises enterprise. A common use-case for a web site is to collect data for storage in a database in an enterprise environment. Likewise, the first thing most customers want to move into the cloud is their web site. Ironically, the idea of moving a whole enterprise architecture into the cloud can appear to be a daunting task. So, if one wants to host their site in the cloud but keep their data in their enterprise, what’s the solution? This post will address that question and point out how the Windows Azure Service Bus between a Windows Azure Web Site and an on-premises database can be a great glue between your web site and your enterprise.

This is the second post in the Real World Problems with Windows Azure Web Sites. The first post summarized how one can manage multiple environments (development, staging, production, etc) using a Git repository with a branching strategy. Not everyone wants to use Git, and most would prefer to stay in their favorite IDE – Visual Studio 2012 – all day to do pretty much everything. My buddy Sayed Hashimi told me about Visual Studio profiles a few weeks ago and I’d been wanting to write up something on how it could work with Windows Azure Web Sites. This post follows up on the idea of managing multiple Windows Azure Web Sites, but rather than do it with Git, I’ll show you how to manage multiple sites with only Visual Studio’s awesome publishing-with-profiles features.

This is the first post in the Real World Problems with Windows Azure Web Sites blog series, as it intends to answer one of the most common questions I receive when I’m doing presentations about Windows Azure Web Sites. This situation demonstrates a typical setup, wherein a site owner has multiple environments to which they push their web site. This setup is extremely valuable for staging site releases and for delivering solid web applications or for doing A-B testing of a site’s changes. In order to make sure your changes are okay, it helps to have a staging and production environment to use to make sure things are good before one makes their changes live in a production environment. My good friend and colleague Cory Fowler blogged about continuous deployment with Windows Azure Web Sites, and my other good buddy Magnus Martensson did a great presentation at Windows AzureConf on the topic. I’ve done countless demonstrations of continuous deployment with Web Sites, but one question always comes up, that this post intends to answer.