ASP Experts » Visual Studio 2010

Tip #109 Did you know … How to speed up build time by only building the currently selected project in a multi-project solution?

Editor — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:42:27 +0000

When working with a solution that contains numerous projects, I find myself often wanting to only build and run the currently selected project. Other projects in the solution might have build errors that I don’t want to resolve at the current time. By…(read more)

Documenting Key End-to-End Deployment Scenarios

Editor — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:54:00 +0000

The IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) and the deployment features introduced in Visual Studio 2010 enable you to automate many deployment tasks, but we have heard you all that many common scenarios not yet documented fully. We are addressing this need by creating step-by-step walkthroughs that will guide you from beginning to end through scenarios that address common real-world needs. Interestingly, this blog post is not the documentation of the solution but actual documentation of problem statements. This post presents the first set of scenarios that we have identified and solicit your feedback to help us determine they are representative enough or not. If you have any feedback as usual you can post them here as comments or…(read more)

Announcing HTML5 & CSS3 support for Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Editor — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:09:00 +0000

Since the last few months it feels like web standards are moving at pace that we would really like them to move. Every browser is pushing the envelope ahead including our very own IE9. For the first time it feels like web is getting the extra freedom of expression that it deserves and we want to contribute to that. ASP.NET developers have been asking for HTML5 & CSS3 support all the time and today we are super excited to announce the public availability of Visual Studio Web Standards Update which brings a ton of HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1 . VS Web Standards Update is a free extension available for anyone who is using Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and it provides HTML5 & CSS3 support based on current W3C specifications…(read more)

Enabling IIS Express support in VS 2010 Sp1

Editor — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:40:00 +0000

With the Sp1 release of Visual Studio 2010 now available for download , you now have the option to use IIS Express as the development server for your web projects instead of the built-in Visual Studio Development server (aka. Cassini). Here are some previous blog posts explaining the IIS Express integration features in VS 2010 Sp1 Beta, which are also available with this new release of Sp1: VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta IIS Express Integration VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express should both be installed to enable IIS Express support To enable using IIS Express as the development server for your web projects, you need to have both the Sp1 release of VS 2010 as well as the IIS Express web server installed. See the 'Installing…(read more)

HTML5 & CSS3 in Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Editor — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:47:27 +0000

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta last month, there has been a lot of questions regarding the support for HTML5 and CSS3. HTML5 Visual Studio 2010 was originally released without HTML5 support, so does SP1 finally add support for it? Yes, to some extent. The entire HTML5 specification isn’t supported but most of the new elements and attributes are. That means you get both intellisense and validation for HTML5 with SP1. Turn it on After installing SP1 you have to tell Visual Studio to start using the HTML5 schema. Go to Tools -> Options, and then select Text Editor -> HTML -> Validation . You should now be able to select HTML5 or XHTML5 as the target schema. Or if you have the HTML Source Editing toolbar enabled, you can…(read more)

How to get Razor intellisense for @model in a class library project

Editor — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:44:00 +0000

Many of us follow a modular architecture and create MVC3 Razor view in a separate class library project. Following is a screenshot of the class library project that I have created. Now if I open a view with @model typed in it, I notice that it shows squiggle for @model and no intellisense is shown. (error: There is build provider registered for the extension '.cshtml') The reason behind the error is that Visual Studio 2010 (for Razor tooling) requires web.config file (with some specific settings) to be in the project so that the MVC Razor host (which adds the @model directive) gets registered correctly. The workaround would be to drop the attached web.config (rename the attached file from web.txt to web.config) to the root of the project…(read more)

How to get Razor syntax support in Visual Studio 2010

Editor — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 19:07:00 +0000

What’s Razor? Razor is a simple-syntax view engine that is released as part of ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) 3. Read more about the syntax on ScottGu’s blog or on ASP.NET How can I get Razor syntax support in Visual Studio 2010? It’s simple. Install the MVC3 RTM bits via Web Platform Installer or download the installer directly to run it yourself. Both the options run AspNetMVC3Setup.exe and it installs Visual Studio 2010 support for Razor syntax in addition to other components bundled in the exe. What does ASPnetMVC3Setup.exe install for Visual Studio to support the syntax? The ASP.NET MVC 3 installer includes the following components. Components in bold add the support. ASP.NET MVC 3 runtime components ASP.NET MVC 3…(read more)

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta IIS Express Integration

Editor — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 23:05:48 +0000

A few days ago Jason Zander blogged about the availability of Visual Studio SP1 Beta (all links below in resources section). I am happy to let you guys know that with SP1 Beta we have enabled integration of IIS Express into Visual Studio. After you have installed SP1 Beta you have to download IIS Express separately for the option to “light up”. After you’ve downloaded and installed IIS Express you can now create Web projects and Websites which use IIS Express instead of Cassini (the default web server used in Visual Studio). For more information regarding the difference between IIS Express and IIS/Cassini please see Scott’s blog linked below. Visual Studio 2010 has two types of web projects; Web Application Project (WAP) and Website projects…(read more)

XDT (web.config) Transforms in non-web projects

Editor — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:47:33 +0000

One of the really cool features that we shipped for Visual Studio 2010 was web.config (XDT) transformations . Because the transformations are so simple and straightforward one of the first questions that someone asks after using it is “how can I use this in my other projects?” Unfortunately this feature is only built into the Web Application Projects (WAP). But it is very easy to reuse this because we just rely on an MSBuild task to do the heavy lifting for us. I received an email from that basically went like this “Hi, I would like to use XDT transformations on my WPF project for both the app.config file as well as my unity.xml file. How can I do this?” So one answer is to modify your project file to use the TransformXml task as I have blogged…(read more)

Working with different versions of AjaxControlToolkit in Visual Studio 2010

Editor — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 04:52:00 +0000

When working with different versions of AjaxControlToolkit , Visual Studio 2010 contains some interesting improvements compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. When adding a particular version of AjaxControlToolkit controls (or other similar third-party controls) to the toolbox using the Choose Toolbox Items dialog, we now show the version number of the control that is being added. Figure 1 Once various versions of these AjaxControlToolkit (ACT) controls such as ACT 3.0 and ACT 4.0 are added to the toolbox in separate tabs (one tab per version), o nly the latest applicable version of the ACT controls will display as visible in the toolbox. This reduces confusion when different versions of ACT are present. The version number of the control…(read more)