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When working with different versions of AjaxControlToolkit , Visual Studio 2010 contains some interesting improvements compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. When adding a particular version of AjaxControlToolkit controls (or other similar third-party controls) to the toolbox using the Choose Toolbox Items dialog, we now show the version number of the control that is being added. Figure 1 Once various versions of these AjaxControlToolkit (ACT) controls such as ACT 3.0 and ACT 4.0 are added to the toolbox in separate tabs (one tab per version), o nly the latest applicable version of the ACT controls will display as visible in the toolbox. This reduces confusion when different versions of ACT are present. The version number of the control...

Some Best Practices and Guidance for Web Control Vendors Targeting Visual Studio The goal of this post is to provide guidance for control vendors on best practices for writing custom controls with regard to their behavior in Visual Studio. It is designed to give vendors insight into how Visual Studio behaves when performing common actions related to custom controls, as well as suggestions to optimize the experience for their consumers from within VS—largely concentrating on VS versions 2008 and 2010. This post does not cover runtime or control programming concepts such as usage of any control or design-time specific APIs. For more information on these other concepts, please see the “links and other resources” section at the...

We have had some customers ask why they are unable to target earlier frameworks .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 using Visual Studio 2010. Targeting earlier frameworks (also known as Multi-targeting) is in-fact fully supported in VS 2010, but there is a pre-requisite that .NET Framework 3.5 Sp1 must be installed on the machine for VS 2010 to be able to target any of the earlier frameworks 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. During VS 2010 installation, only the latest 4.0 version of the .NET framework will be installed on your machine as part of the Visual Studio installation. So if 3.5 Sp1 was not already present on your machine, you will see only the .NET Framework 4 in the target framework dropdown of the New Website / New Project dialogs (In these dialogs, framework dropdown...

Visual Studio 2010 improves .NET framework multi-targeting by applying framework-appropriate filtering to the property grid and Intellisense. For example, if you select a button on a web form of a .NET 2.0 web project, in the Property Grid you will see: If you go to the Project Properties and change the Target Framework version to 4.0: ...the Property Grid display will change to display 4.0-specific properties: While this looks simple and straight-forward, there's actually an illusion at work! Only one framework can be loaded into an AppDomain at a time, and Visual Studio uses .NET 4.0 specific capabilities. So the actual controls displayed on the design surface are always 4.0 controls. Their properties are filtered for display in the Property...

I wrote couple of posts describing how Web MultiTargeting (Web MT) works in VS 2010… You can find those posts at: All for that small Drop Down Box – Part 1 All for that small Drop Down Box – Part 2 Today  I hope to cover few other things related to MultiTargeting that the team focused on during VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4 cycle… Silverlight MultiTargeting VS 2010 will allow you to develop Silverlight (SL) projects seamlessly…  SL has got its own runtime versions like SL 2.0/3.0 and eventually there will be SL 4.0 too…  SL development has been possible with VS 2008 where you might have your Web Projects using SL 2.0 or 3.0 and now when VS 2010 comes out is is obvious that developers will expect smooth migration and upgrade for their...

Web MultiTargeting (Web MT) for VS 2010 has been a great journey of fine technology and a tons of learning for me in person, I am sure everyone in the team feels very similar (although some may add “ + lot of pain ” into the mix :-))…  Yesterday, I published some of the details around what Web MT offers web developers in VS 2010… You can read it at: All for that small Drop Down Box – Part 1 I covered approx 10 different features of MultiTargeting in the previous post, today I am going to time box myself to a couple of hours to write as much as I can and then see if we need Part –3 of this series in few more days or not… :-) Anyways, let us get started!! Filtering Markup Intellisense One of the essential benefits of working within IDE like...

Multi Targeting in Visual Studio 2010 is surprisingly a big feature area… It falls under the category of what we called as a “Divisional Initiatives” which spans across nearly all of Visual Studio and .NET Framework teams… Even engineers from outside of VS and .NET teams contributed significantly on the project... With this series of blog posts I am going to merely focus on MultiTargeting (MT) for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET 4… First of all let me call out by saying that in VS 2008 there was only one version of CLR i.e. CLR 2.0… Various framework versions i.e. .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 were only changes to the framework assemblies which still ran on the same CLR 2.0…  With .NET 4 this equation changes coz .NET...

Visual Studio 2010 will allow you to move your projects from previous versions of Visual Studios  to VS 2010 with ease, I will call this process as “ Converting ” the project from VS 200X to VS 2010…  VS 2010 will also allow you to change your project’s Target Framework Version to .NET 4.0 from .NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5…  I will call this process as “ Upgrading ”… The reason why VS allows you to deal with these two concepts separately is due to various reasons, some of which can be: You might be ready to use the latest and greatest tooling features of VS 2010 even if you are not yet ready to move to .NET 4.0 just yet… You might have a big solution with various projects and you might want to move few of the project to .NET 4.0 first...