ASP.NET has included support for "friendly URLs" for a while now. ASP.NET MVC has always supported friendly URLs and more recently, so has Web Forms. That means if you don't want to have the .aspx extension, you certainly don't have to. However, there's a LOT of existing legacy apps out there as well as apps that you may not have full control over. For example, there's a site that I want to influence but it's got dozens (hundreds) of links to foo.html and bar.html existing pages. Legacy (n): A super-fancy way of saying "already exists." What I want to do is kind of sloppy and I'm doing it for aesthetic reasons. I'll hopefully get around to updating the site's links later and know that future...

Since announcement of 4 community created Single Page Application templates when releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 in February 2013, the community has done some updates to the templates and released 2 more templates: Backbone template and Breeze/Angular template.  You can view the details and download the templates at http://www.asp.net/single-page-application/overview/introduction/other-libraries .  To use these templates, please make sure you installed Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, which included ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2. Template’s website (if have any) and source location are listed here: Backbone Template https://github.com/kazimanzurrashid/AspNetMvcBackboneJsSpa Breeze/Angular template http://www.breezejs.com/samples...

I hope you've updated to Visual Studio 2012.2 and picked up Web Essentials because we're continuing to add goodness all the time. As we march forward with the One ASP.NET vision , so does the community. One of the major goals has been to make it easier for the community to not only make templates but also live alongside ASP.NET templates as peers. This has been historically hard. It's still too complex, in fact, but it's easier than before . I'm hoping that one day soon making templates will be as easy as making and sharing NuGet packages . Not only is most of ASP.NET open source , but so are the Azure SDKs, NuGet and more. However, there's a large and rich world of open source frameworks and projects that some companies...

I've been looking for ways to save money running my (now 12) websites in the cloud lately. Getting insights from logs has been helpful, but I really want more details as to what my app is doing so that I might do less of it. Remember the secret of scaling an application. Have your app do as little as possible. If you do nothing, you can scale infinitely. I like to use tools like Glimpse to profile my apps, check database calls, and explore what's really going on. If you like application insights you may be familiar with New Relic . They are a clever system that profiles apps of all kinds, including sites ASP.NET and Azure. I tweeted this afternoon for folks to hit my site and help me test New Relic. My lovely friends on Twitter promptly...

After releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2, which is also included in Visual Studio 2012 update 2, we’ve received a few customer feedback about their VS shows an error dialog saying: An exception has been encountered. This may be caused by an extension. You can get more information by examining the file 'C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ActivityLog.xml'. When looking at ActivityLog.xml, the following error message may show up: System.ComponentModel.Composition.ImportCardinalityMismatchException: Duplicate EditorFormatDefinition exports with identical name attributes exist. Duplicate name is LESSCSSVARIABLEDECLARATIONCLASSIFICATIONFORMAT To solve this problem, one just need to update the “ Web Essentials...

I’m excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3.  WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010 , and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js.   Today’s release includes a ton of great new features.  You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video: Some of the highlights of today’s release include deep Windows Azure integration, source control tooling for Git and TFS, and a new remote editing experience.  Windows Azure Integration With WebMatrix 3, we are making it really easy to move to the cloud.  The first time you launch WebMatrix 3, there’s an option to sign into Windows Azure.  You...

There's a great website called http://whoownsmyavailability.com that serves as a reminder to me (and all of us) that external dependencies are, in fact, external. As such, they are calculated risks with tradeoffs. CDNs are great, but for those minutes or hours that they go down a year, they can be super annoying. I saw a tweet today declaring that the ASP.NET Content Delivery Network was down. I don't work for the CDN team but I care about this stuff (too much, according to my last performance review) so I turned twitter to figure this out and help diagnose it. The CDN didn't look down from my vantage point. I searched for things like "ajax cdn,"microsoft cdn," and "asp.net cdn down" and looked at the locations...

The ASP.NET content maps are lists of resources that we have reviewed and recommend. The content maps have been popular in their present form, but we’re looking at ways to improve them, such as by publishing more lists but with a narrower focus to each one, by providing more information for each link, and by formatting them differently. Here are links to the existing content maps and three pages that show new approaches we’re considering:  ASP.NET Deployment Content Map ASP.NET MVC 4 Content Map ASP.NET Data Access Content Map How to deploy an ASP.NET web application to a Windows Azure Web Site using Visual Studio How to secure an ASP.NET MVC app How Do I Configure FTP Security in IIS? We’re calling the new lists “curated views.” Curated...

This morning we released the v2.0 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK with some really great new features and enhancements.  These new capabilities include: Web Sites : Visual Studio Tooling updates for Publishing, Management, and for Diagnostics Cloud Services: Support for new high memory VM sizes, Faster Cloud Service publishing & Visual Studio Tooling for configuring and viewing diagnostics data Storage : Storage Client 2.0 is now included in new projects & Visual Studio Server Explorer now supports working with Storage Tables Service Bus : Updated client library with message pump programming model support, support for browsing messages, and auto-deleting idle messaging entities...

This morning we released some great enhancements to Windows Azure. These new capabilities include: Virtual Networks : New Point-to-Site Connectivity (very cool!), Software VPN Device and Dynamic DNS Support Virtual Machines: Remote PowerShell and Linux SSH provisioning enhancements Cloud Services : Enable Remote Desktop Support Dynamically on Web/Worker Roles Ruby SDK : A new Windows Azure SDK support for Ruby All of these improvements are now available to start using immediately (note: some services are still in preview). Below are more details on them: Virtual Networks: New Point-to-Site Connectivity and Software VPN Device support Last week we announced the general availability of Virtual Network support as part of our IaaS release. Virtual...