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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...

Some customers discovered that sometimes switch to Design view was very slow. We analyzed submitted reports and tracked the issue down to a code that was discovering available AJAX Extenders and which contols they were applicable to. In order to avoid unnecessary delays we moved discovery of AJAX extenders to a background thread. This made switch to Design view significantly faster since designer is now available immediately while extenders are still being enumerated. Here is a screenshot, look at the status bar that shows "Discovering AJAX extender controls..." and displays a small progress indicator: If you select a control before applicable extenders are discovered, the control will not display its smart task menu and/or will not...

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...

The feature I'm most excited about in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is ironically one you might not notice at all. Problem If you're reading this, you probably know (and are still untangling the double-negative logic of) the "Disable script debugging" option in IE. Say you just spent 10 hours debugging script. It's time for a break. You read your favorite blog. Suddenly, you are presented with: Needless to say, you probably did not "wish to debug" the rest of the world's script... especially after a day of debugging your own. But you hesitate to uncheck the option because you know you're going to need it again tomorrow. Solution IE8 now enables debugging on-demand. Thanks to a feature we tucked into VS2008...

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...

The SQL database publishing wizard is a very popular web-downloadable add-in for Visual Studio 2005. The publishing wizard addresses the issue where a developer needs to deploy a local database from his development machine to a hosting environment on a remote machine. We received a lot of positive feedback for this wizard and we decided to integrate this with Visual Studio 2008. This is a feature that was added post Beta2 and will be available with Visual Studio 2008 RTM. The wizard supports two key database hosting deployment scenarios: 1. It generates a single .SQL script file which can be used to recreate a database on a remote machine Using the Database Publishing Wizard you can point to a database on your local machine, and then automatically...

If you are using Visual Studio 2008, you might have noticed that it doesn't have item templates for ASP.NET Mobile Web Forms (which were previously available in Visual Studio 2003). To help users with this scenario, I've created the following item templates for ASP.NET Web Site and ASP.NET Web Application projects: Mobile Web Form Mobile Web User Control Mobile Web Configuration File The templates are available in both VB and C# versions. One limitation users should be aware of is the Design View in Visual Studio 2008, which is based on a completely new archtecure, does not display ASP.NET mobile controls. However, using these templates you should be able to develop ASP.NET Mobile applicaitons using the Source View just fine. Once installed...

If you are using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, and are building applications for Silverlight using Javascript, there is a cool project from Justin-Josef Angel , which I recommend checking out. Using Justin's library and Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, one can get much richer Javascript intellisense experience for Silverlight. Below is an example of the additional intellisense information Justin's library provides: VS 2008 javascript intellisense for Silverlight w/o Justin's Library VS 2008 javascript intellisense for Silverlight with Justin's Library: For more details about his project and how to use it, check out Justin's blog . --Omar Khan Group Program Manager Visual Studio Web Tools Read More...