Latest Microsoft Blogs

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...

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...

I am attempting to compile the relevant resources for ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview 2 at one place so that you will not have to keep searching around... ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 Download Location: Preview 2 Download (English-US) - Microsoft.com download location to get the latest MVC bits... ASP.NET MVC Documentation: Home Page - Asp.Net home page where you can find latest updates on ASP.NET MVC Framework in general...   User Documentation - The official Microsoft user documentation on ASP.NET MVC Framework... Readme File   - Contains a ton of information on how to install the preview 2 and how can it play well if you already have MVC Framework Preview 1, Silverlight etc... ASP.NET MVC Learning Forums - There is a ton of activity...

Vishal’s earlier blog post, ASP.NET MVC Test Framework Integration , outlined the motivation and steps for registering a third party test framework for use with ASP.NET MVC Applications. " In lines with best practices one of the goals of this new ASP.NET framework is to enable easy unit testable web applications. To ease unit testing and to make it part of our regular application development workflow Visual Studio is introducing integration of unit test projects with ASP.NET MVC Application..." Today, I will work through the steps Vishal outlined with some actual templates I have created and then run the tests using the corresponding third party framework. Below are the relevant steps Vishal outlined in ASP.NET MVC Test Framework Integration...

  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...

Previously I gave an overview  of new tooling features for ASP.NET MVC Framework that we are hoping to make available during MIX 2008 timeframe.  You can read more about Overview of MVC Tooling Features for MIX 2008 here .  Goals: ASP.NET MVC Framework is Microsoft's implementation of MVC framework which is hugely popular in the industry for best practices and conventions.  In lines with best practices one of the goals of this new ASP.NET framework is to enable easy unit testable web applications.  To ease unit testing and to make it part of our regular application development workflow Visual Studio is introducing integration of unit test projects with ASP.NET MVC Application.  Many in the community are already...

In December 2007, we had released Community Technology Preview (CTP) version of VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects... Thanks a ton to all of you in the community for being so active in adopting and trying the CTP versions of WDP... Since the December CTP we have been monitoring the blogs, MS Connect feedback system as well WDP forums to collect your feedback and then have been working over last month or so to incorporate it within the product... Today is a big day for the WDP team as we are finally able to provide you all with the final "Release To Web" version of Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects... We are very excited to have you all try this RTW version so without any further delay let us get into the details of how to get started:...

Bug fixes: <param>Text</param> was not handled correctly. Comments in <% %> blocks were not included in spell checking. Spell checking terminated prematurely under certain conditions after encountering <% %> block. REM VB comments were not always handled correctly. Vista setup issues fixed (hopefully) New features: It is now possible to add word to "ignore" list. The list is global and is stored as a text file. You can also add words to the Office active custom dictionary. More details here Visual Studio 2005 Add-in download Visual Studio 2008 Add-in download Read More...

When you add a global.asax file to your "Web Application Projects (WAPs) like below: and then write code in Application_Start event and try to debug it like below using Visual Studio inbuilt Development Web Server   Then during your first debug the breakpoint is hit but during your subsequent debug runs the breakpoint is not hit. The reason behind this is that we do not kill the ASP.Net Web Server process after your every debug run and hence Application_Start() is not fired every time.  There is a good reason why we do so...  Starting ASP.Net Web Server process is an expensive task and in most of the scenarios recycling this process after every debug would adversely impact your performance...  If you do not want to debug...

The Visual Web Developer team is looking for a few talented and experienced invididuals to join our team. We have opportunities in development, testing, and program management. Our team builds Visual Studio features that enable creating applications for ASP.NET, IIS, Silverlight and Sharepoint. Here are links to our current openings: Program Manager Lead Software Development Engineer Lead Software Development Engineer in Test To submit your interest in any of these positions, please email -- venusblg-at-microsoft-dot-com -- with an attached resume. -- Visual Web Developer Team Read More...