Latest Microsoft Blogs

If you have downloaded the RTM version of SP1 for Visual Studio 2008, you may get an error when trying to debug a Web Site with a host header on IIS 6 or IIS 5.1. The error message reads: "Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server. Please see Help for assistance." (Figure 1: Error Message when debugging a Web Site with a host header. In this case, the host header is www.test.com ) Scope This issue only appears on Web Sites configured with a host header on machines with IIS 6 or IIS 5.1 and the RTM version of the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1. Background Lukasz Pawlowski, a program mangager on the Reporting Services team, published a great blog post describing the...

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2008 SP1 are now available for download .  This blog post highlights the major changes in SP1 related to web development. New Web Development Features in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 The following is a list of new features in SP1 which relate to web development: Class Libraries and Web Application Projects in Express JScript Formatting More Support for External JScript Libraries Dynamic Data Templates SQL Server 2008 Support WCF Renaming Support IIS Module and Handler Templates Multiple Selection in Design View (new since SP1 Beta) For more details on the above features, please see the following articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-sp1-beta.aspx http...

We have been listening to your [strong] feedback and we are now happy to announce that multiple selection and alignment operations in Design view are coming back and will be included in VS 2008 SP1 RTM and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP1 RTM. We do understand that designing pages using absolute positioning of elements is a highly controversial issue and some people have strong opinions on it. However, many users have been relying on the functionality that Visual Studio used to provide since VS 2002 and expected feature to stay in subsequent versions. In VS 2008 we replaced old IE based designer by a new designer that is shared with Expression Web and is based on former FrontPage technologies. Unfortunately, neither FrontPage nor Expression...

A number of great improvements and changes were made for Silverlight Tools Beta 2. The following list summaries some of the major changes with details on each below. WCF templates for Silverlight Enabled. Build configurations. XAML Validation now reports build errors. Setup Improvements. Projects created in Beta 1 are prompted for conversion when opening to Beta 2. Linking a Web Site to a Silverlight Application. 1. WCF Templates for Silverlight Enabled. WCF templates are now enabled for Silverlight. If you want to add Web Services to your Silverlight application, this is the route to go. To do this, right click on your web site node in the Solution Explorer and choose “Add New Item”. This will bring up the “Add New Item” dialog. Choose the...

Every year we send a team to TechEds to meet you, our customers. They will be at the event site from 8.30 AM to 6.00 PM to answer your questions from June 3rd to June 6th. This time we have the following representatives at TechEd. ASP.NET Team: Kathy Carper, Scott Hunter, Simon Calvert, Clay Compton, Konst Khurin, Mark Rosenberg and Robert Boedigheimer Web Development Tools Team: Barry Tang, John Dundon, Vinaya Bhushana Gattam Reddy and Vishal Joshi So come talk to them and find out more about what our team has to offer. Also, watch out for a demo from Simon and Vishal on the Newest features in ASP.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Web Developer . The session time and code is as mentioned below. Session code: WUX306: A Lap Around the Newest...

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta is now available! You can download it here . In SP1, we have added some new features as well as many bug fixes. In this blog post I’ll attempt to give an overview of the features as well as some of the key issues the Visual Web Developer team has addressed so far in the service pack. New Features : Class Libraries and Web Application Projects in Express Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition now has support for Class Libraries and Web Application Projects. This enables you to leverage features only available in Visual Studio Standard and above before, including project-to-project references and the web application project build system. To create one of these projects, you can simply go to File > New Project...

Colorization, validation, IntelliSense, and formatting comprise the core of any modern editor. With VS 2008 SP1, we are completing the core JScript editor by introducing code formatting. Additionally, we have promoted JScript to a dedicated node in “Tools Options” providing a clean separation from the HTML “Tools Options”. We realize many folks have been waiting for this feature and we’re excited to be able to finally provide it. We’re using “beta” period to fine tune the feature for final release. Thus, we would love to hear any feedback you have. There are two areas in particular I’d like to highlight: Correctness – It goes without saying that code integrity is of highest priority. We’ve done extensive testing to make sure nothing beyond the...

As a part of creating a way for customers to directly communicate with the product team and get help if they are running into performance issues in Visual Web Developer 2008 or web-related features in Visual Studio 2008, the product team has created a public alias to report all performance related concerns about the product. The alias is vwdperf-at-microsoft-dot-com . Your performance issue can be a major blocker that prevents you from working with the app or a pet peeve that has annoyed you. You are also welcome to send in suggestions for performance enhancements in future releases. Now is a great time to send in your feedback. We are actively looking into addressing performance issues in the next release, and timely feedback will help us a...

Update to the preceding blog post... we've just made available an 04-23 refresh of the Dynamic Data Release on the Code Gallery website. This release includes some nice runtime enhancements for routed URLs, Dynamic Data Wizard templates in the Visual Basic language, plus a whole bunch of bug fixes and codegen improvements. For a complete list of changes in this release, check out the Release Changes page on Code Gallery. Direct link to the download page: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=dynamicdata&ReleaseId=954 As usual, we are looking forward to your feedback! Bradley Millington | Web Development Tools, Microsoft Read More...

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a great innovation for creating data-driven Websites.  It provides two key features: The ability to render data by defining templates, either at the page-level (for example, to define default renderings for list, details, edit, and insert pages) or the field-level (for example, to define default renderings for different data field types or foreign key relationships).  This feature allows you to update data templates in a single location, which will take effect across your entire site for the various objects/schema in your data model. The ability to specify metadata on the data model that defines custom validation rules or display hints.  The metadata that you define on the model results in custom behavior...