Latest Microsoft Blogs

With the release of ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 RC (details here ), we have added a couple of new features to Page Inspector in Visual Studio 2012, namely CSS Auto-Sync and JavaScript Selection Mapping. I explain these features in the context of a MVC 4 Single Page Application (SPA app) below, which is a new template available in this release. But the Page Inspector improvements are available for all the other kinds of web projects as well, such as other types of MVC projects and web forms projects. CSS Auto-Sync Let’s get started by creating a new MVC 4 SPA application using VS 2012. With VS 2012, once the application is created, you can right-click the MVC project and ‘View in Page Inspector’ and the page will load in the...

The CSS Editor for Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is a complete rewrite of the 2010 version, featuring excellent performance and stability. As soon as you start to edit a CSS file or a style block embedded in a web page, you'll feel the difference! CSS 3.0 has expanded the richness and complexity of style sheets considerably, and the new editor steps up to make the change not just manageable, but productive. Select the CSS 1.0, 2.1, or 3.0 schema to work with (default is 3.0) and start typing. The first thing you'll see is an overwhelming number of properties available, over 250. Even more appear if you start your property name with a "-", revealing all the vender-specific properties available: While the list may look overwhelming...

Over the last several months the “new wave” of web standards have been  moving at an accelerated pace, All the popular browsers are pushing the envelope including Microsoft’s own IE9 and the new standard open up exciting new opportunities for developers. Microsoft at large and the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams are heavily invested in [...] Read More...

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One of our goals in Orchard is to make it possible and simple to change and customize the markup and style for everything that gets rendered by the application and its modules. Of course, this is made a lot trickier by our other big requirement of making everything a composition of atomic parts. Yesterday, we brought on site a web developer who is a fan of Drupal and is occasionally using Joomla! and WordPress, in order to get some good feedback after her using Orchard on a project. And that we got. One of the many interesting things she told us had one essential quality though: it was immediately actionable. Here is the idea. This is the generated markup for an HTML widget in Orchard: < article class ="widget-html-widget widget"...

Today I saw a post on stackoverflow.com asking Using Microsoft AJAX Minifier with Visual Studio 2010 1-click publish . This is a response to that question. The Web Publishing Pipeline is pretty extensive so it is easy for us to hook in to it in order to perform operation such as these. One of those extension points, as we’ve blogged about before, is creating a .wpp.targets file. If you create a file in the same directory of your project with the name {ProjectName}.wpp.targets then that file will automatically be imported and included in the build/publish process. This makes it easy to edit your build/publish process without always having to edit the project file itself. I will use this technique to demonstrate how to compress the CSS &...

These last few weeks I’ve been refraining from starting any deep work on my new Orchard-powered blog because most of what I had in mind involved widgets, which are being built right now. Version 0.8 is just around the corner: the team is just putting the final touches to the new theme engine and to the widget system. In the meantime, there is still some work I could do that I knew would not be throw-away, and that is CSS. My objectives with this new blog is to reflect in design what the content is about and what it is not about. VuLu is about knowledge, science, art and philosophy. It’s not about shiny gadgets, technology or engineering. That of course means I want nothing web 2.0 in here. Good thing as I don’t have much love for rounded corners...

I recently posted some CSS and HTML snippets for a buttons collection I was using for a Menu style UI Scott Koon from www.LazyCoder.com posted a comment with a better way (thanks Scott). This way I don’t have to set the CSS Class for each button. Just contain them in a div. Here is the [...] Read More...

Pain is often a great motivator for invention, unless you become dull to the pain. I think CSS is one of those cases where there’s a lot of pain that we as web developers often take in stride. Fortunately not everyone accepts that pain and efforts such as LESS are born. As the home page states: LESS extends CSS with: variables, mixins, operations and nested rules. Best of all, LESS uses existing CSS syntax. This means you can rename your current .css files .less and they’ll just work. LESS solves a lot of the pain of duplication when writing CSS. Originally written as a Ruby gem, Chris Jowen ported a version to .NET not surprisingly called .less . Here are some examples from the .less homepage: .Less implements LESS as an HttpHandler you add...

My team is looking for a new full-time developer. The project is to build a completely new open-source CMS based on ASP.NET MVC 2. It’s a lot of fun :) https://careers.microsoft.com/JobDetails.aspx?ss=&pg=0&so=&rw=1&jid=9434&jlang=EN Read More...