Tool Choice for WordPress Creation: Visual Studio or Webmatrix?

Question

I would like to build my first Wordpress site as quickly as possible, but I happen to lean towards Microsoft products. I don't plan on touching code/PHP to build my Wordpress site, but I should mention that I am currently an expert C# developer in Visual Studio and have built ASP.NET 1.1 in the past. So should I go with Visual Studio 2010, or should I start using Webmatrix? Again, I will make some effort to avoid actual coding. What features does Webmatrix have that 2010 does not in this "setup Wordpress" endeaver? I see that Webmatrix has an app-gallery where I can select Wordpress "straight up." Can VS 2010 do that? Do I care?

If someone out there thinks that both VS and Webmatrix are bad choices for getting started with Wordpress, please do say so. But absent such criticism, which of the above tools should I embark with?

Answer 1

Based on what you want to do I would recommend Webmatrix, because it allows you to do what you want easily based on the post you provided:

1. It will allow you to easily download and install the application from within Webmatrix, which is something that you can't do with Visual Studio.
2. It seems like it has wizards built-in to upload the page to a hosting provider.
3. The process of installing Wordpress Plugins does not require an IDE, so it shouldn't be part of the selection process.

Note that it is still in Beta so I am not sure if the functionality is perfect yet. I would start with it first and if it doesn't live to the expectations or if the functionality you require is buggy I would move to Visual Studio.

If you on the other hand are only interested in downloading Wordpress on your LOCAL computer, you can also use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and install Wordpress using it from the Windows Web Apps Gallery.

Answer 2

Wordpres have a wide variety of free and premium themes, if you are not planning to touch any php code then it will be pretty easy for you to get a theme and install it via the wordpress admin, if you have a simple custom design i you may wanna check Divine Project it will not be the same as a custom made theme since as far as i can tell no WYSIWYG software will make perfectly clean code.

Also i think wordpress now runs and works with ASP, hope it helps.