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Useful Visual Studio Extension – Web Essentials from Mads Kristensen

Editor — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:03:02 +0000

Visual Studio 2010 is really extensible and that's allowed many folks on the team to try out new features for Web Development without having to rebuild Visual Studio itself. One of those "playground" extensions is called " Web Essentials " by Mads Kristensen. Mads handles HTML5 and CSS3 tools for our team. You might remember Mads from when we released the Web Standards Update a few months back. Web Essentials is Mads' playground and it's pretty awesome. It's so awesome that I think you should check it out and then, *ahem*, leave a comment on this post encouraging Mads and gentle urging his boss(es) to get these features into the next version of Visual Studio. First, it adds a few nice touches to the…(read more)

SlowCheetah – Web.config Transformation Syntax now generalized for any XML configuration file

Editor — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 08:49:20 +0000

I did a post last year called If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong that also included a video of my talk at Mix10 where I show how to deploy website with Web Deploy. One of the cooler not-very-well-known features is called Web.config Transformation. Once folks see it, then immediately want a general solution. First, from the previous post: You can right-click on your web.config and click "Add Config Transforms." When you do this, you'll get a web.debug.config and a web.release.config. You can make a web.whatever.config if you like, as long as the name lines up with a configuration profile. These files are just the changes you want made, not a complete copy of your web.config. You might think you'd want to use…(read more)

CoffeeScript, Sass and LESS support for Visual Studio and ASP.NET with the Mindscape Web Workbench

Editor — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 22:06:37 +0000

There's some really impressive stuff happening in the .NET Community lately. Folks are reaching outside their standard built-in tools and pulling inspiration from everywhere. It's been said that (some) Microsoft developers don't like to use tools or technologies that aren't built in to Visual Studio. However, myself and others have been pushing the concept of LEGO blocks snapping together. Rather than thinking of Visual Studio as a giant single block, consider it as a small block amongst many others. Feel empowered to choose the technologies that work for you and discarding the ones that don't. I talked about this LEGO analogy in my DevDays keynote in The Netherlands earlier in the year . Snap in tools like the HTML5 Web…(read more)

DotPeek from JetBrains–Free .NET Decompiler

Editor — Thu, 19 May 2011 12:32:06 +0000

Some years ago Lutz Roeder, a clever your guy at Microsoft built a decompiler for .NET assemblies and made it freely available to the developer community. (Reflector) A couple of years ago Red Gate Software acquired Reflector and earlier this year announced that it would no longer be free. Due to the massive backlash of [...] Read More……(read more)

Win7 Mobile Development Tools

Editor — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 20:58:21 +0000

If you haven’t installed the Visual Studio Mobile tools for building Win7 applications I would highly recommend you do so now via one of the following links: Main Site: http://developer.windowsphone.com/ FWLINK: Windows Phone Developer Tools The release notes can be found here: Release Notes Programming Resources: http://charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html Channel 9 Training: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/WP7TrainingKit/ Windows Phone Developer Forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7series XNA Creators Club: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/ Pre-Requites: Uninstall any non-RTM versions of VS 2010. Thanks, –Mike Read More……(read more)

SmallestDotNet Update – Now with .NET 4 support and an includable JavaScript API

Editor — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:44:03 +0000

A few years back I wrote a post on the size of the .NET Framework . There's historically been a lot of confusion on the site of the .NET Framework. If you search around on the web for ".NET Framework" or ".NET Framework Redistributable" you'll often get a link to a 200 meg download. That download is the complete offline thing that developers redistribute when they want to install the .NET Framework on any kind of machine without an internet connection. The .NET 3.5 Client Profile is more like 28 megs and the .NET 4 Client Profile is a looking smaller that than, in fact. Back then I made this website, SmallestDotNet.com to help out. It'll sniff your browser's UserAgent and tell you want version of .NET you…(read more)

2009 Blogged – Greatest Hits

Editor — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:08:45 +0000

While I (really) unplugged in December of 2009, you can access a nice calendar of all my 2009 posts (as well as other years) at this link . In 2008 I published a Greatest Hits post that I will keep updated, but here's a list of links to the posts I most enjoyed writing this last year. I hope you find some of them useful, and perhaps you missed one or two or you just started reading recently and this 2009 "Greatest Hits" Post will catch you up on the stuff I was thinking about this year. General Geekery Painful Reminder: Focus on Core Competencies (and Back Stuff Up) 10 Awesome Things I Remember About Computers FizzBin – The Technical Support Secret Handshake Paving my machine for a fresh 2009 – First-Pass Must-Haves Low Bandwidth…(read more)