Back when ASP.NET was in Beta, the ASP.NET team decided that while Visual Studio .NET was a great overall development tool, it had three inhibiting drawbacks:
Its size
Its cost
Its "do everything" nature
The Enterprise edition of Visual Studio .NET, for example, costs several thousand dollars and uses multiple CD
If your machine has, for example, 128 MB of RAM, you must be a very patient person to use Visual Studio .NET
In order to combat these problems of Visual Studio .NET, the ASP.NET team set out to create a new developer tool--one geared solely for the ASP.NET developer
The team decided that this tool must be small, agile, great at what it does, and inexpensive
Designed by people in the ASP.NET team during their off hours -- after work and on the weekends
On June 17th, 2002 the ASP.NET team released their tool to the public
This tool, which is still in Beta testing, is called the ASP.NET Web Matrix Project
ASP.NET Web Matrix Project was designed to:
Connect developers to the ASP.NET community
Help developers provide feedback on new features
Experiment with new feature ideas