Today Visual Studio 2012 RC (Release Candidate) came out. There's a lot of nice improvements for Web Development in this release candidate as we march towards a final release. Here's some of my favorite new features from the "Angle Brackets Team." That's my name for the Web Platform and Tools team . I hope it sticks. Web Optimization There's been some significant changes to the web optimization (minification and bundling) framework since beta. There wasn't enough control over what was bundled and in what order in the beta, so that's been moved into a BundleConfig.cs (or .vb) where you have total control, but everything just works out of the box. The API has been simplified and is slightly more fluent which means...

Visual Studio 2012 RC is now available to download. Please visit Jason Zander's Blog for detailed announcement. We have more web development enhancement and features in RC. We’ll discuss some of them in future blog posts. Here are a few web development enhancements and features in Visual Studio 2012 RC since Beta . Updated Web project templates New project creation performance is greatly enhanced Cleaner markup Cleaned up Empty template (now it’s really empty), added basic template, removed “Single Page Application” for MVC4. Optimization support in Web Forms project template Enabled unit test project templates for all MVC project types. MVC4 RC included Introduced Web API scaffolding that you can do a full ApiController that uses Entity...

I was working on an app locally using a daily build (newer than the currently released one) of ASP.NET MVC and deployed it to a host. I noticed this weird CSS issue. See how the text box on the left running on localhost is small and not styled while the one on the right running on the host is the correct width? You can click on the screenshot if you need to see more. I dug around a little and using the F12 browser developer tools (as well as good old View Source) I noticed the HTML being created was different! My local app was producing one bit of markup, then when I deployed the same app to my host I would get different markup! Here's the app's markup running locally: <input class="text-box single-line" data-val="true"...

I've always wanted a really lightweight way to publish websites. It turns out that my co-founder, Todd Proebsting, was looking for the same thing. We couldn't find anything that met our needs, so we decided to build it. The result is Site44 , our startup's first product. What is Site44? Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites. You pick a domain for your website, Site44 creates a folder for it in your Dropbox, and then you publish by just dropping content into that folder. What Site44 does not do is host server-side code, like PHP and ASP.NET. It's for pure static sites, but I'm continually amazed at how many sites are static (or can be). Sign up for the beta! Site44 is in a private beta (about thirty friends and family...

We have been on a roll with respect to changes over the last few weeks – here’s some of the highlights. If you want to see the full list then you can either track the commit page or follow the project which will then show you the updates on your codeplex home page . As in the previous update this is a sneak-peak of code checked into our CodePlex source code repository but not yet released as part of our official installer . See Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages for how to try out these features. Per Controller Type Configuration ASP.NET Web API has a HttpConfiguration object that provides configuration for features including routing, dependency resolution, media type formatters, and message handlers. However, while the HttpConfiguration...

Some interesting updates were checked in over the last week. As in the previous update this is a sneak-peak of code checked into our CodePlex source code repository but hasn’t yet been released as part of our official installer . See Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages for how to try out these features. Per-Route Message Handlers Support for per-route message handlers has been a popular request on our issues list . The issue is that HttpMessageHandlers is a flexible extensibility point for dealing with HTTP requests and responses but they are configured once per application within the HttpConfiguration . In some scenarios you have different needs for different services so a more flexible registration is needed. Brad Wilson describes...

Netduino Go is designed for much more than toy projects, but one has to recognize that toy projects are fun and also great learning experiences. Today, I want to take you through the process of reproducing the behavior of a famous toy that you will surely recognize. That toy, that has helped many of us realize what poor motor skills we possess, has two knobs that control the horizontal and vertical coordinates of a pen that draws into the dust on the back of a simple screen. It’s a great mechanical device that is part of western culture. Our version will use two potentiometers , a 320x240 LCD display , a button to erase the screen, and of course a Netduino Go . The hardware setup looks like the following: We connected the button to port 2 (but...