Latest Microsoft Blogs

Visual Studio 2010 is really extensible and that's allowed many folks on the team to try out new features for Web Development without having to rebuild Visual Studio itself. One of those "playground" extensions is called " Web Essentials " by Mads Kristensen. Mads handles HTML5 and CSS3 tools for our team. You might remember Mads from when we released the Web Standards Update a few months back. Web Essentials is Mads' playground and it's pretty awesome. It's so awesome that I think you should check it out and then, *ahem*,  leave a comment on this post encouraging Mads and gentle urging his boss(es) to get these features into the next version of Visual Studio. First, it adds a few nice touches to the...

I'm planning on updating the Hanselminutes.com website to look more modern and look more like this newly redesigned blog . Until then, one of the things I wanted to try was to update the application with some simpler code. The Hanselminutes podcast website is running the same VB.NET WebForms application it was on the day I started the show in January of 2006 (almost 300 episodes ago!) Sure, the app runs fine and there's no real reason to update it, but I wanted to see how quickly I could do it and if the code felt cleaner. There's a few requirements I need to make sure I don't miss: I'd like a new URL scheme. Currently showid is the database, not the logical "show id." Rather than http://www.hanselminutes.com/default...

One of the demos in my Mix 11 talk " An Overview of the MS Web Stack of Love " was showing how IIS Express and Visual Studio SP1 (as well as WebMatrix) can make working with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) a heck of a lot easier. If you've used Cassini before (that's the little built in Visual Web Developer Server) you've likely noticed that I doesn't support SSL. This makes working with real world sites a little challenging. If you want your Login pages and Account Management pages to use secure sockets, you'd typically have to do all your work with the full version of IIS, either installed on your own machine or using a shared server. Here's a few ways to enable SSL. The first is new in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and...

Such a fun time was had at Mix 11 this last week in Vegas. I only saw a few talks as I was busy presenting, but now as I sit at home on my first day back, I say to myself, Self, how can I get all the Mix videos at once? First, you can watch all the videos online at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/MIX/MIX11   Second, you can get them via RSS. Most major browsers are hiding the RSS button these days, but the discovery metadata is all still there. In IE9, for example, if you show the Command Bar, you can see the RSS Feeds for the Mix site: What's all this awesomeness? Oh, yes, it's the Mix talks via RSS with enclosures, just as you've always wanted. Now you can list the thousand ways that you might retrieve these lovely files and...

It's Day 1 of the Mix 11 conference here in Las Vegas. I work for the Web Platform and Tools (that's ASP.NET, IIS, IIS Media, etc) group and I did the Web Platform demos for Scott Guthrie's part of the keynote. A lot of people in Dev and QA worked hard all year long to make some fun and cool products and as the designated "talking head," I had just 16 minutes to make all of them (people + products) look good. I hope I did them all justice. We built a backend and a front end for Rob and my sie http://www.thisdeveloperslife.com . The show is something Rob Conery and I do moonlighting on the side (it's our hobby, not our job nor a Microsoft thing) but we needed a new site and this was a fun idea since we built the original...

Have you implemented the NuGet Action Plan ? Get on it, it'll take only 5 minutes: NuGet Action Plan - Upgrade to 1.1, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer . The Backstory: I was thinking since the NuGet .NET package management site is starting to fill up that I should start looking for gems (no pun intended) in there. You know, really useful stuff that folks might otherwise not find. I'll look for mostly open source projects, ones I think are really useful. I'll look at how they built their NuGet packages, if there's anything interesting about the way the designed the out of the box experience (and anything they could do to make it better) as well as what the package itself does. MvcMailer sends mails with ASP...

With the Sp1 release of Visual Studio 2010 now available for download , you now have the option to use IIS Express as the development server for your web projects instead of the built-in Visual Studio Development server (aka. Cassini). Here are some previous blog posts explaining the IIS Express integration features in VS 2010 Sp1 Beta, which are also available with this new release of Sp1: VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta IIS Express Integration VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express should both be installed to enable IIS Express support To enable using IIS Express as the development server for your web projects, you need to have both the Sp1 release of VS 2010 as well as the IIS Express web server installed. See the 'Installing...

I wrote a post a few days ago called " Creating a NuGet Package in 7 easy steps - Plus using NuGet to integrate ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing Web Forms applications ." Long enough title? I think so. The post exists for two reasons: First to show folks how insanely easy it is to create a NuGet package (and prompt you to make some yourself) and second to share with you some experiments where one enables new/interesting functionality after File|New Project. In that example, we had an existing ASP.NET WebForms application and added ASP.NET MVC to it in one line, making it an easy hybrid application. Well, not really one line. In version 0.5 of the AddMvc3ToWebForms package you still have to hook up the Areas, Routes and Filters yourself...

UPDATE: Check out my follow up post where I remove the need for editing the Global.asax.cs and show up to Update and Publish a NuGet package . Last month I wrote a post called Integrating ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing upgraded ASP.NET 4 Web Forms applications where I showed a very manual and very painful way to add ASP.NET MVC support to an existing ASP.NET WebForms application. You'd then have a lovely hybrid that is both MVC and WebForms. One of my readers, Yannick said: This screeaaams NuGet Indeed it did, er, does. He's saying that this is just the kind of awful boring work that NuGet should make easier. So I did it. Thanks Yannick for just the sassy comment I needed to jump into action. First, what I built, then how I built it. I'd...

I've spent the last few weeks travelling around presenting WebMatrix, Razor and ASP.NET MVC 3 to folks. Many people have existing WebForms apps or MVC apps with WebForms Views. The question has come up a number of times, "Can I mix Razor Views and WebForms Views in a single ASP.NET MVC application?" The answer is, "No, Yes, and Maybe, But It's Not Supported." Most commonly the scenario is that someone has an existing WebForms (ASPX) Master Page that works nicely, and they now want to include a few Razor pages in their application but don't want to maintain two effectively identical Master Pages (one for ASPX, one for Razor). They want to share their WebForms Master with both WebForms and Razor Views. First, the...