Build mobile web sites that adhere to W3C Mobile Web Best Practices using the new WebMatix web development tool.  This tool introduces simple-to-use ASP.NET Web Pages which don’t follow the MVC pattern nor do they include server controls like WebForms.  It also introduces the “Razor” templating engine and a model where you have HTML and inline code where needed.  This way to building sites is easy and flexible and takes me back to the golden age of Microsoft ASP web development in the late ‘90’s.

Our favorite mobile database, SQL Server Compact 4.0 finds it’s way to the web with this tool providing a simple way to give your mobile web site a database.  It’s been beefed up and tuned for the stress of providing data services to Internet and supports 256 concurrent connections.  Since it’s a file-based database, you just copy it along with your web pages to your on-premise server, web hosting provider or Azure.

Last but not least, you get IIS Express which is a welcome replacement for the Cassini development web server currently used by Visual Studio.  This gives all developers the power of IIS 7.x without needing Administrator access to their box, even if they’re running on Windows XP.

The lightweight, inline-code nature of developing with WebMatrix makes it easy to build low-bandwidth sites that follow XHTML Basic 1.1 recommendations so you can target any mobile web browser.  From there, it’s up to you to determine if you want to support more advanced features found in mobile browsers like IE Mobile, Opera, or Webkit (iPhone, Android, webOS or Blackberry).

- Rob