In preparation for enhancing Visual Studio design-time experience testing, we’d like to collect a catalog of real world applications to use for performance, stress, and ad hoc testing by the Web Platform and Tools team. We’re looking for small, medium, and large applications covering a range of architectures, languages, frameworks, and features. Your contributions will help us to ensure stability and performance in the areas of greatest interest to you. These additional testing opportunities will also help us ensure that we will have more real world samples to verify every release of Visual Studio whether it is Beta, RC or RTM. If you are interested in helping us, please provide the following information: Please send an email to WptApps@live...(read more)
Some Best Practices and Guidance for Web Control Vendors Targeting Visual Studio The goal of this post is to provide guidance for control vendors on best practices for writing custom controls with regard to their behavior in Visual Studio. It is designed to give vendors insight into how Visual Studio behaves when performing common actions related to custom controls, as well as suggestions to optimize the experience for their consumers from within VS—largely concentrating on VS versions 2008 and 2010. This post does not cover runtime or control programming concepts such as usage of any control or design-time specific APIs. For more information on these other concepts, please see the “links and other resources” section at the...(read more)
When we released Beta2 in Oct 2009, there was a lot of customer excitement about the super cool features in VS 2010. However, one recurring complaint from customers was that the performance of VS 2010 was not on par with Orcas. Customers were experiencing general slowness in a lot of features that was hindering them with daily operations. We heard you all loud and clear. Since then our team has put in a lot of hard work to deliver a first class experience in Web Developement and have fixed a lot of performance issues seen in Beta2. The most notable ones are 1. Switching to Desiger from Editor 2. General Designer performance 3. Loading Toolbox 4. Command line msbuild 5. Build and Rebuild within IDE 6. Adding events by double-clicking controls...(read more)
Visual Web Developer 2010 Express is available for installation via the Web Platform Installer at http://micorosoft.com/express/web . The English SKU was published on April 12 th , French, German and Japanese went live on April 27 th and Spanish, Italian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean will be released soon. Running the Web Platform Installer on an operating system of one of the available languages automatically selects that language of Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (VWD) to be installed. You can select a different language by using the Options link at the lower-left corner of the main WebPI window. In the “Change Options” dialog, select the language you’d like to have installed. If it’s available, you’ll see...(read more)
Hi, I’m Dan Chartier, I work on the Web Tools designer and helped improve its performance in Visual Studio 2010. For some background, Visual Studio 2008 completely replaced the original trident (Internet Explorer) designer with the FrontPage designer (which is also used by Expression Web). While we gained many improvements with this change, we received customer complaints about various performance problems that we wanted to address in 2010. In general, the designer is quite fast. This is especially true when editing pure HTML documents, which is what it was originally designed to do well. However, the designer edits more than HTML. It also has the rather sophisticated ability to edit ASP.Net pages containing various interesting web controls...(read more)
Web Deployment (see this posting for an overview) offers a set of pre-determined options to allow users to include the most common sets of files for deployment. These options are as follows and can be found under the “Items to deploy” section on the Package / Publish Web property page. Only files needed to run this application: This will include only the files required to run the application. Specifically, files to be included will be those found in the bin folder and those files whose Build Action property = Content (such as .aspx, .ascx, and .master). All files in this project: This will include all files within the project file. All files in this project folder: This will include all files in the source project folder, including those not...(read more)
Publishing using MSDeploy In-Process Deployment or Remote Agent Through the Beta 2 release, VS 2010 had only supported publishing to servers using MSDeploy's IIS deployment handler technology integrated with the “Web Management Service”, a.k.a. WMSVC. As long as you had an account on a hosting server using WMSVC, you could use MSDeploy to update your web content. This is the msdeploy technology most people will use when publishing to a hosted site and, therefore, was released first. (In case you are interested in how the server should be configured, check out the link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd722796(WS.10).aspx ) In the RC release of VS 2010, We added support for two more msdeploy technologies that target specific deployment...(read more)
With Office 2010 releasing, some of you might be upgrading to Office 2010 from Office 2007. A plain uninstall of Office 2007 might also run into the issue described below. If this is something you have done (or plan to do) and are running a 64-bit OS, please keep on reading. On machines with a 64-bit OS, uninstall of Office 2007 will break the VS 2008 web designer. You will find that the VS designer won't be able to load, and any attempts to switch to Design View will hang the product. Note that 32-bit machines are not affected and neither are other VS releases. The root cause of this problem is that Office 2007 and the VS 2008 web designer both share a component, 32-bit MSXML5. When Office 2007 uninstalls or gets upgraded, MSXML5 is removed...(read more)
In VS 2010, if you are accessing the Session state in the OnInit(…) method of your page, similar to the following code snippet: then you will encounter an “Error Creating Control” for ASP.NET controls when viewing the Design view of the page. For example, if you have an ASP.NET button control on the page, the designer will display the error: “ Error Creating Control – Button1 Session state can only be used when enableSessionState is set to true, either in a configuration file or in the Page directive. Please also make sure that System. Web.SessionStateModule or a custom session state module is included in the <configuration>\<system.web>\<httpModules> section in the application configuration.”. Screen shot of the error: However...(read more)
Quite some time ago, when Vista just went RTM, Risk Strahl discovered that when he used Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse, code intellisense and markup validation in Visual Studio stopped working. Since several activities in VS are done in a background on idle (not to be confused with background threads - idle processing is performed on the main thread), it was clear that VS was not getting any idle time slots, i.e. something was keeping OS busy. We tracked the issue down some third party applications as well as to a bug in Microsoft Wireless Mouse driver that was keeping OS busy and prevented OS from going to sleep or launching screen saver. See Knowledge Base topic for details and workarounds/updates. What about Windows 7? The fix was included...(read more)
July 12, 2010