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Here are three new tips on Tips and Tricks Blog. Tip #4 Did you know… You can add browsers to Visual Web Developer using the “Browse With…” option Tip #5 Did you know… How to Databind a ListView control? Tip #6 Did you know… About the “Tag Navigator” feature? Have a great weekend! Reshmi Mangalore SDET, Web Development Tools Read More...

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...

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...

I've noticed quite a few people run into the issue "Why is design mode empty for my web user control (ASCX)?". It's not obvious what might be causing this bug, so I thought I'd offer an explanation and a couple workarounds. Problem You have a user control that has a "link" tag to an external style sheet or a "style" tag with local styles at the top of the page. Immediately below the style, you have a web control (such as a Wizard control) that contains the bulk of the content. You attempt to edit this user control in design view and all you see is an empty page. Here's a trivial example: Explanation Design view was originally created to handle full HTML pages where the "body" and "head"...

Design view in Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 provides several tools that help with absolute and relative positioning of controls. I'd like to describe how do they work and what kind of visual hints the designer provides. How do I set my control position to absolute? Use Format | Position menu: Unfortunately, because of a bug, the menu is disabled for <span> and <a> based controls. To enable the menu, add style="display:block" to labels or hyperlinks. This will be fixed in the next service pack. You can then use the Position dialog to set positioning mode: In most cases you'll want absolute positioning . After setting the position you should be able to move the control around. There are two...

  Wanted to update you on a upcoming web cast that I am doing in support of Visual Studio 2008 launch event... Title : New Enhancements for Web Developers in VS 2008 Date/Day: Tuesday, February 26th 2008 Time: 11am to 12:30pm Pacific Standard Time (PST) Description :Get an overview of how Visual Studio 2008 takes web development to the next level. See highlights of the key new Web tools experiences in the Visual Studio 2008 product including support for multi-Targeting,  JavaScript enhancements, rich support for CSS standards, rapid development of data-bound web pages using LINQ To SQL, and more. Also learn about the new Web Application Project and Web Deployment Project enhancements to Visual Studio which adds an alternative Web application...

Following Visual Studio 2008 release I updated my Spell Shecker add-in to make work with VS 2008 as well as added some new useful functionality. So here is version 2.0, updated for VS 2005 and 2008. What's new in version 2.0: Spell checker now supports text verification in: HTML style comments <-- HTML --> ASP.NET server side comments: <%-- ASP.NET --%> JScript, C# and C++ comments: // C++ style comments CSS and C style comments: /* C style comments */ VB and VBScript style comments: 'This is VB comment Spell checking is supported in style and script blocks as well as in JS, CS, VB, CSS, CPP ahd H files. There are two separate binaries for VS 2005 and VS 2008. The can be installed side by side if you have both VS 2005 and VS 2008...

I'm glad to announce that Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition has officially shipped, and is now available for immediate download . Here is a quick summary of some of the great new capabilities in this release: Tools to Design Web Pages Use the new Split View pane which shows both the visual designer as well as the corresponding markup Build CSS enabled pages with the new Manage Styles and CSS Properties windows to easily design, preview, and apply CSS styles to your Web page Build JavaScript and AJAX-enabled applications more easily with improvements to JavaScript IntelliSense and debugging and built-in support for ASP.NET AJAX Download the free AJAX Control Toolkit which includes over 30 AJAX controls including rounded corners, drop...

Jim Cheshire who is working in Microsoft Customer Support wrote a new book on the Visual Web Developer 2008 " The Microsoft Expression Web Developer's Guide to ASP.NET 3.5: Learn to create ASP.NET applications using Visual Web Developer 2008 ". It describes all the new features that VWD 2008 brings for Web designers and, of course, all other features we've made. Jim is the author of several books, including books on Expression Web. He has been working with ASP.NET since before its first release. From Jim: The first thing you’ll notice when you pick up this book is that I use Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition (available free from Microsoft) to create the ASP.NET application. I chose VWD instead of Expression Web because it’s...

After Orcas Beta1 released, some web developers mentioned that there is no documentation available for the new CSS editing features. Since I played around with this feature a lot recently, I would like to give it a try and explain it a little. The first tool I’d like to mention is the style application tool bar. This tool bar enables designers to make visual changes on the design surface using CSS and maintain control over where the CSS is generated and how it is applied to the markup. The style application tool bar looks like this. The Style Application drop down has two modes, Auto mode and Manual mode. In auto mode, Visual Studio chooses where the new style gets applied. In manual mode, the user controls where the styling is applied via the...