New Version of Web Matrix Making Progress...
Our team has been spend some cycles the last few months on a new refresh of Web Matrix. We've unfortunately been heads-down on ASP.NET V1.1 and ASP.NET V2 for the last several months -- which is why the refresh has taken longer than we origionally hoped for.
I got some great demos today of a few new features that will go down really well with customers. My two favorite new features include in-line user control design-time support (so you actually see the user control contents within a page -- rather than the grey box that shows up today), as well as cool new support for Access/Jet databases (creating, editing, modifying and displaying them). The later in particular will be great for ISP hosting scenarios -- especially given the new hosting support that will ship with ASP.NET V1.1. Nikhil has also done a great job updating the look and feel of the IDE -- giving it a much more "alive" feeling that feels pretty cool.
Our current plan is to get all of the refresh features implemented by the end of this week. We'll then spend a few weeks testing and fixing bugs (we're doing a full ASP.NET V2 test pass which will unfortunately delay this somewhat) -- and then ship it to the web later next month. I am really jazzed to get this refresh out -- hopefully folks will find it well worth the wait. :-)