Latest Microsoft Blogs

I’m excited to announce – WebsiteSpark – a new program from Microsoft that provides software and support for building web sites, at no cost for 3 years. What You Get Software: WebsiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for 3 years at no upfront cost (there is only an exit fee of $100 payable upon exit from the program).  Once enrolled, you can download and use the following software from Microsoft: 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Blend, Sketchflow, and Web) 2 licenses of Expression Web 3 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of...

The public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available and can be downloaded here . This is one of the most compelling updates to Visual Studio we’ve seen in years.  The entire IDE has been refreshed with a new look and all the code editors including the HTML and ASPX editors have replaced with a new extensible editor based on WPF. One of the reoccurring themes throughout Visual Studio 2010 is developer productivity.  For example integrated into the new code editors is a consume first workflow where you can start calling methods on classes even before they exists.  Then you can have VS generate the new code extending the class as you type. Community is another theme in Visual Studio.  Integrated into the new project...

The IIS team has just shipped the Microsoft Application Request Routing 1.0 module for IIS7!!! Application Request Routing (ARR) enables Web server administrators and hosting providers and to increase Web application reliability and scalability through rule-based routing and load balancing of HTTP server requests. With ARR, administrators can optimize resource utilization for application servers to reduce management costs for Web farms and shared hosting environments. To learn more about the features in ARR, check out the ARR site . To get started with ARR 1.0 – download it now using the Web Platform Installer (Web PI) . The IIS.NET site also has some create tutorial content on how to use ARR . Below is a list of some of the ARR tutorials available...

Today, deploying a web application is not as easy as it should be. Whether you are deploying your web to a shared hosting environment and paying monthly to maintain it OR whether you have a web server/s managed by your enterprise, there are a lot of manual steps involved in getting your application from point A to point B. If you are deploying your web application to a shared hoster then today you have to use technologies like FTP which take a long time to get your web content to the hosted server. After deploying your content you have to manually go to hoster control panel and install your database by running sql scripts and configure various IIS settings like marking a folder as an application to isolate it from the rest of the application...

  At PDC 2008 in LA and TechEd EMEA 2008 in Barcelona we announced key new features for Visual Studio 2010 for Web Developers...  Apart from our focus on MVC, Dynamic Data, Silverlight and other key ASP.NET runtime functionality, this was the first time we announced the key investments pillars for Web Developers in VS 2010 ...  Over the next year or so we will be writing in details about these new features, but to start off  I thought it would be great to share various videos which are available to view online today ... Visual Studio 2010 - Web Development Overview In this talk we provided the glimpse of the major investment areas in VS 2010.  The talk is divided into following key areas Design View - Improved CSS 2...

In SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008, C# introduced a new feature to provide 'live' reporting of compilation errors. Unfortunately, the introduction of this functionality also introduced a bug where in certain cases, false C# compilation errors appear in the Error List for ASP.NET Website projects. Specifically the following is a list of issues you may have experienced due to this bug in SP1: If you have a breakpoint in a code-behind file. On project open, you get incorrect errors in the Error List for that code-behind file (e.g. – button1 is not declared). These errors do not go away until you open that code-behind file. Once you open the code-behind file, the errors go away. When you open a code-behind file,...

A while back we updated IntelliSense to not fail when referencing jQuery. However, getting IntelliSense for chained calls and rich summary/parameter hints still required adding special comments to a few thousand lines of jQuery. If you didn't have the time, you could download such a file from friendly members of the community such as James and Brennan . As part of our new partnership with jQuery , yesterday we announced the availability of the official IntelliSense documentation file. As you can see, our friends at jQuery have added a new download link for Visual Studio at http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#Download_jQuery . You can also download the file directly from http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.2.6-vsdoc.js . As you might guess...

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...