It’s not very clear how to delete a site from the “My Sites” dialog in WebMatrix. You’d think there’d be an option right in the dialog. Unfortunately, in Beta at least, this is how you go about deleting your sites:

1. Open the site you want to delete
2. Right-click the site in the left pane (in any workspace)
3. Choose to Delete, and confirm

You should return to the WebMatrix start screen. However, note that this does not actually delete your site off your hard drive – it just clears it from the list of sites in My Sites. You’ll still have to delete the physical folder yourself.

Let’s say you’ve been tinkering and you’ve built something cool. It’s got lots of pages written in the “Razor” syntax and you might want to sell it as the start of the next big website. Maybe it even has a database with some useful data in it. How are you going to share it with the world?

Well, this is the web, isn’t it? You have to get it up on a web server somehow. You have to have a web hosting provider who runs the server for you, so it will be available 24/7 like every other website on the web.

Ready to go? While you have your site open in WebMatrix, click the Publish button in the Ribbon. You’ll see a form like this:

Do you have a hosting provider? If you do, all of this information is usually sent to you in an e-mail when you buy the hosting. Here’s a run-down of what is required from the form:

• Protocol: Web Deploy, FTP, or FTP/SSL (FTPS). You may have heard of FTP or FTPS, but what’s Web Deploy, you ask? Well, it’s another protocol for publishing websites that is more complete than FTP – it can publish  more complicated databases (like MySQL or SQL Server) that aren’t file-based as well as transfer over site settings, file permissions, and more! Learn more about Web Deploy here [warning: it's probably overkill]. So if you have certain site settings you want to retain on your remote web server or you want to publish a database with a connection string (MySQL or full SQL Server), you’ll want to use this and make sure your web hosting provider supports this protocol on their servers. If all you want to publish are files, including file-based databases, you can live with just using FTP/FTPS.
• Server: This is the address of the web server you want to push your website out to. You really need to get this from your web hosting provider.
• Username/Password: Self-explanatory These are the credentials that allow you access to the web server.
• Site Name: An interesting thing about the Web Deploy protocol is that it needs a little bit of information called the Site Name. It’s generally the same as the public-facing domain name of your site, like simtan.members.winisp.net . You should check with your web hosting provider, though. With FTP/FTPS, this field is replaced with Site Root, which would be the path to a folder on the server.
• Destination URL: This is the URL that the public would use to access your published website from the Internet. You may not know this yet; don’t worry, it generally isn’t required.

Think you have it all filled out correctly? Try the Validate Connection button.

Don’t have a hosting provider and think you can’t try all this? There is a not-well-advertised aspect to WebMatrix during the beta period: A few hosting companies are giving away free hosting that works with WebMatrix, even the Web Deploy part. So anyone can get their website online for everyone to see! Just click that “find web hosting” link in the dialog or find it in the dropdown that comes out from the Publish button on the Ribbon. You’ll see a screen like this:

All of the companies listed on the page are offering free web hosting through the links there. So go grab your free hosting account and then come back to fill out the settings for Publishing.

You’re well on your way to getting your site online! Learn more about WebMatrix and see the full story of deploying a website as part of this post.

Today, my team just released WebMatrix, a tool that provides a small, simple, and seamless web development experience. You should try it out! 

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/default.aspx

It’s a tool that helps anyone build websites either from scratch (using a really easy-to-learn inline syntax using C# or VB code) or from an existing open-source application like Wordpress or Drupal. It includes all the things a developer needs to build a modern dynamic website, in a 50MB or less download: 

• A development web server
• A database engine (including support for a file-based database)
• A framework (based on ASP.NET, of course, but PHP is supported too)
• An IDE, including a code editor

 The cool thing is that you can publish your app, database and all, straight from WebMatrix up to a Windows Server and it will work 100%. 

Here’s a walkthrough on how to get started building from scratch:

http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/1-getting-started-with-webmatrix-and-asp-net-web-pages

There’s also a nice article about it here:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/07/microsoft-unveils-webmatrix-web-development-suite.ars

Web development just got fun again. Let me know what you think!

This time, it really all boiled down to my Master’s thesis, which is about creating a collaborative game on mobile phones for unschooled children in rural India. Quite different than what it was originally, but that’s how things go in the world of graduate school.

An earlier version of the paper was used as the final paper in a course on Human-Centered Computing, and a shortened/polished version of the paper was submitted to a conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Check out http://sybak.com for a fresh re-arranging of all the work I’ve done thus far in life.

Next stop: making big waves at Microsoft Corporation up in Redmond, WA starting October 2009.

Google Geo Developer Workshop
Monday, Feb 9, 2009
12:30-3:30pm
110 South Hall, UC Berkeley

The description includes the promise of working on “sample projects such as making an interactive campus map, displaying your observational data in Earth, or planning optimal routes between your classrooms and favorite lunch stops.”

Hrm… can they actually guide people to make a CalMap clone in 3 hours?? I gotta see this.

http://sybak.com/

For each of the projects I put up:

• Physical Battleship
• Nominal Color Encoding Generator (a.k.a. Palette Assistant)
• Map of the Internet

… optimized versions have been uploaded along with their source code. To see their source code, simply load them, right-click on the Flash player area, and choose “View source”.

http://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/simontan/

Many of the posts there are required by the courses I’m taking, so you’ll see (forced) posts more often!

P.S. The downside of a blog hosted by the School of Information is that I am a lot more restricted server-wise. That is, I am not free to do things such as embed any old Flash object I want, like I can do here:

This new version is based on the latest version of the Google Web Toolkit. In honour of their milestone 1.4 release (half a year in the making), I dub this CalMap release to be version 1.4 as well! GWT 1.4 brings us lots of performance improvements and new interface widgets which we have used to great effect. Check out the new SuggestBox (autocompletion), for example!

I invite you to play with this release, and let us know of any bugs that may have sprung up with the upgrade. An issues list is maintained at our Google Code site.

See Screenshot.

About future updates: Since GWT is now open-source and actively worked on, you might expect a new release of CalMap soon after each release of GWT. We will try to add functionality to CalMap when we have time, but the GWT release cycle is a better indicator of the frequency of CalMap updates.

The Campanile

My Cisco Office Building