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 supporting the new wave of web standards in our tools and platforms.

ASP.NET developers have been asking for HTML5 & CSS3 support and yesterday we announced the public availability of Visual Studio Web Standards Update which brings a ton of HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  

The VS Web Standards Update is a free extension available for anyone who is using Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and it provides HTML5 & CSS3 support based on current W3C specifications.

Here are some highlights of what’s included !

HTML5

VS Web Standards Update provides you intellisense and validation for most common HTML 5 features like:

Browser APIs

• Geo-Location – Having location aware websites is growing trend and now you will have full intellisense and validation within Visual Studio for creating websites which are location aware.  For sample view the source for the IE9 test drive demo.
• Local Storage – IE has been supporting local storage from IE8 onwards, now Visual Studio will provide you with full fidelity intellisense to create sites which can save state within browser.  For sample of try view source on HTML5 Demo Site

CSS3

This update supports intellisense and validation for most of the CSS3 modules including:

Also, if you are trying to make websites which work well on a variety of platforms and browsers you will love the fact that Web Standards Update not only supports IE specific prefixes like –ms; but also other browser prefixes like –webkit and –moz.

Some links :

• Download URL 
• VWD Team Announcement post by Mads Kristensen
• Walkthrough post by Scott Hanselman
• Reference post by Vishal Joshi
• Web Standards Update – behind the scenes by Mads Kristensen

NOTE:  The Web Standards Update works on both VS 2010 SP1 and VWD Express 2010 SP1.  As this is a Visual Studio Extension,certain CSS3 selector syntax & Browser API intellisense may not be supported in Visual Web Developer Express. .

Beta 2 of the Python Tools for Visual Studio has shipped. 

This is primarily a bug fix release with lots of involvement from the user community. 

Release notes & the bits are available at: Beta2: http://pytools.codeplex.com/releases/view/63597

The project lives at : http://pytools.codeplex.com

Coinciding with MIX 2011, the VB/C# Languages and TC teams have released the second Visual Studio Async CTP that is compatible with VS2010 SP1 and provides Windows Phone 7 support.

The first CTP had more than 19,000 downloads, more than half a million views of the videos, many blogs and a lot of community excitement.

With this release we are excited about the ease with which developers can now provide responsiveness to their phone applications. We changed the EULA to allow using the CTP “As is” so that phone developers can use it in their Marketplace applications.

Check it out !

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/async

In this post I demonstrated using the Package Manager (NuGet) to install jQuery into your Website.

It’s a different experience in Visual Studio 2010 / Visual Web Developer Express so I thought I’d provide another post that walks you through it.

Plus, there is a tiny gotcha that might case new developers pause.

First, fire up Visual Studio.

In this case, I’ll be using Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express 2010 (The FREE Version) with Service Pack 1 (SP!) Installed.

If you are JUST getting started, install VWD Express 2010 via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. You can read full instructions HERE.

After starting the IDE create a new Web Site.

NOTE: if you are using Visual Studio Pro or above you won’t see “New Web Site” as an option on the start-up screen.

It’s OK – just select File->New Web Site

Then select the Default “ASP.NET Web Site” template.

Once VWD has created your new web site, use the Visual Studio Menu to select :

Tools –> Library Package Manager –> Add Library Package Reference

Read the rest of this entry »

Chart Control
Dynamic Metadata
Permanent Redirect
Imperative WebForms Routing
Declarative WebForms Routing
Outbound WebForms Routing
Auto Start
Clean Web.Config Files
Predictable Client IDs
Selective View State
The HtmlEncoder Utility Method
New Rendering Option for Check Box and Radio Button Lists
Persistent GridView Row Selection
Table Free Templated Controls
Easy State Compression
Tableless Menu Control
Imperative JavaScript Syntax
The ScriptLoader
jQuery Syntax for Microsoft Ajax
AJAX Data Templates
Hidden Field Divs
Disabled Control Styling
Introducing the New Chart Control
Managing ViewState with ViewStateMode
Use Routing with ASP.NET Web Forms
Work with URLs in ASP.NET Routing
Code Optimized Profile
Code Search View Hierarchy
IntelliSense Smart Lists
Multi-Monitor Support
New Web Project Template
New Multi-Targeting
Websites Instead of Web Projects
Snippets IntelliSense
Use MSBuild to Automate the Compiler & Merge Utilities

Ya, I know. The name is confusing.

WebMatrix is technically the IDE and the”page model” is technically called “ASP.NET Web Pages”.

I call the whole “stack” Microsoft WebMatrix (The IDE, IIS Express, SQL Compact, and ASP.NET Web Pages/Razor)

The WebMatrix stack was an independent, out-of-band release.

Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (in Beta as of this writing) has some really exciting stuff in it (at least for this geek.)

For those of us that are doing HTML5 work, get excited about the enhanced HTML syntax support.

But if you’re doing WebMatrix work as I am, SP1 brings Visual Studio up to speed for us (cshtml and vbhtml support.)

The WebMatrix tool come with a built-in “Open in Visual Studio” button.

If you have Visual Studio installed on your machine clicking this button will open up Visual Studio 2010 and pass your WebMatrix project context to Visual Studio but since Visual Studio 2010 was released before WebMatrix, you couldn’t do much with .cshtml or .vbhtml files.

SP1 for VS 2010 makes the Side-By-Side experience ROCK !

Click on the Launch in Visual Studio Button and open a page in VS.

Of course we get the kind of stuff we get in the WebMatrix Tool like Razor Syntax Highlighting.

We also get comfortable and familiar stuff like IntelliSense.

Read the rest of this entry »

You are probably hearing more and more about the “next wave” for .NET Developers.

Check out the free training ……….

[ Click HERE to start getting up to speed on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 ]

The VS / VWD startup page displays a collection of current items of interest to developers.

But did you know that you can configure what gets displayed in your Visual Studio / Visual Web Developer home page.

The default looks like this.

But see here how I’ve changed it to show the list of new articles from the www.asp.net web site !!!!

Now when I fire up Visual Web developer I get all the latest articles from the ASP.NET web site articles list.

In a few days I’ll have a NEW RSS feed that aggregates all the “What’s new” stuff from the ASP.NET web site.

I think it’s a cool option that helps keep me “up to date” !

Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects – Released

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality to build and deploy Web sites and Web applications in Visual Studio 2008. This add-in provides a comprehensive UI to manage build configurations, merging, and using pre-build and post-build tasks with MSBuild.

Get Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects HERE.

Read ScottGu’s Post about Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects HERE.

Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office system (version 3.0 Runtime) – Released

This download (VSTOR30.exe) installs the Visual Studio Tools for the Office system 3.0 Runtime, which is required to run VSTO solutions for the 2007 Microsoft Office system built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Get VSTO HERE.

Posting code to your blog ? 

Check out these links to a Visual Studio Add-In to let you Cut  and Paste code as HTML.

Click HERE and HERE.

Special Focus issue on Visual Studio Extensibility

Features

• Welcome Letter from the VSX Team
• History of the VS IDE
• Introduction to the Visual Studio 2008 Shell
• How XML Tools Use the Visual Studio SDK
• Visual Studio SDK Tips and Tricks
• Creating and Distributing Packages with the Visual Studio SDK
• Domain-Specific Development in Visual Studio
• Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins
• Learning the Visual Studio SDK with VSSDK Assist
• VSMessenger: Taking the Extensibility Plunge
• XPathmania: Extending the XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005

Get a copy !!

RIAs mean passing data around and XML is one of the big flavors for doing this.

Here is some good information on using them.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302298.aspx

http://www.lovettsoftware.com/blogs/blog.aspx?id=57

http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2006/02/20/535578.aspx

Do you find great samples on CodeProject.com ?

This cool utility for VS 2005 lets you browse Code Project directly in Visual Studio 2005. When you click on a link that would normally download a zip file, it asks you instead if you’d like to open the sample up using the Code Project Browser. If you say yes, the add-in will download the file, unzip it to a base “My documents\My Code Project Samples” directory, then load it directly. It also provides a sidebar where you can view, reload and delete all of the projects you’ve downloaded. Finally, it allows you to keep Code Project favorites, just like any respectable web browser would.

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/cpbrowser.asp

Kirk has an interesting blog post on debugging Javascript (from a PHP page no less) in Visual Studio 2008 here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2007/08/10/javascript-debugging-in-visual-studio-2008.aspx

Every once in a while I catch my self saying – “there sould be a tool to do this”.

Which yesterday found me searching and finding this for neat add ins for Visual Studio!  

The Power Toys Pack Installer.

While looking for some cut and paste utilities for Visual Studios I found this great MSDN Magazine Article. 

Ten Essential Tools
Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now
James Avery

TestDriven.NET
GhostDoc
Smart Paster
CodeKeep
PInvoke.NET
VSWindowManager PowerToy
WSContractFirst
VSMouseBindings
CopySourceAsHTML
Cache Visualizer
Wrapping It Up

Get the article at the link below:

Ten Essential Tools: Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now — MSDN Magazine, December 2005.