Jack @ ASP.NET

As a software engineer, I focus on .NET, especially asp.net, C#, WCF and so on, and I am also very interested in Search Engine Optimization.

Entries Tagged ‘Visual’

Upgrade or Uninstall of Office 2007 might cause VS 2008 Web designer to hang

On machines with a 64-bit OS, uninstall of Office 2007 will break the VS 2008 web designer.  You will find that the VS designer won’t be able to load, and any attempts to switch to Design View will hang the product.  Note that 32-bit machines are not affected and neither are other VS releases.

The root cause of this problem is that Office 2007 and the VS 2008 web designer both share a component, 32-bit MSXML5.  When Office 2007 uninstalls or gets upgraded, MSXML5 is removed yet Visual Studio still needs it.

If you are affected by this issue, there are workarounds where you may not have to completely reinstall Visual Studio.  However, the steps are different depending on how Office 2007 got removed (uninstall vs. upgrade to Office 2010) and also if you have VWD Express or a full product.

Workaround if you manually uninstalled Office 2007 (i.e. Add/Remove Programs) AND have a non-Express version of VS 2008:

  1. Go to Add/Remove Programs
  2. Uninstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component
  3. Reinstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component” -
    • You will need the VS install media: the product DVD or mount an ISO image
    • Go to WCU\WebDesignerCore folder and run WebDesignerCore.exe.
    • Setup does not have UI, so please simply wait about 5 minutes or watch msiexec activity in the Task Manager.
    • Verify that Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component reappears in Add/Remove Programs.
    • WebDesignerCore.exe installs RTM version.
  4. If your VS 2008 has been updated to SP1, you have to reinstall SP1 to update the Web Authoring Component you installed in Step 3.

Workaround if you manually uninstalled Office 2007 (i.e. Add/Remove Programs) AND have Visual Web Developer Express 2008:

  1. Go to Add/Remove Programs  
  2. Uninstall “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component
  3. Reinstall Visual Web Developer Express 2008/SP1
    (SP1 for Express is not a separate install thus the need to reinstall the entire product)

ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Released

ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 are now available. ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 include lots of new features and improvements that enable you to easily build, deploy and manage great Web sites and applications.

Everything You Need to Build Better Websites

Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 makes it easier to edit, search, and navigate code. Improved VB and C# Intellisense makes it even easier to find and use classes within the .NET Framework. Improved JavaScript IntelliSense enables better AJAX development. New code navigation and visualization features enable you to quickly find and navigate large projects and visualize dependencies across your code-base. Improved unit testing, debugging and profiling help support building robust applications.

ASP.NET Web Forms
With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website. ViewState within applications is smaller and can now be more easily controlled. And more controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster.

ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods, enables more modular/reusable applications, and facilitates a clean unit testing and TDD workflow with Visual Studio 2010.

Web Deployment
Visual Studio 2010 makes deploying your Websites easy. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes.

VS 2010 Webinar Session Overviews

Visual Studio 2010 is set to be released in April.  Microsoft has made significant investments to improve the “Testing”, “Architecture”, and “Developer” tools within Visual Studio to make it an even more powerful productivity solution.

VS 2010 Webinar Session Overviews:

TITLE DESCRIPTION
Full Testing Experience: Professional QA with Visual Studio 2010 Join us as we demonstrate the testing and quality assurance lifecycle using Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server. We’ll dive into the testing tools and testing process you can use to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your QA and Test efforts. You’ll see the Microsoft Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) in all its glory as we explore how to manage your test environment, organize test suites, test cases, requirements and bugs, and how to manage both automated and manual test runs. In addition, you’ll see how to easily create an automated test from an existing manual test run. Finally, and most importantly, you’ll discover how insanely easy it is to create bugs that can be simply and reliably reproduced by developers – VS 2010 is that powerful.
Improving Development Practices with  Visual Studio 2010 This is an overview of the new development and database tools in Visual Studio 2010. New capabilities of historical debugging, code analysis, profiling and the new test impact analysis will be demonstrated. Working with Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010, gated-check-in will be discussed as well as the tester/developer collaboration experience. The new architect tools will be demonstrated to facilitate a better understanding of how modeling is a part of the development experience.
Lab Manager – The Ultimate “No More No Repro” Tool Designing, building and testing code is a hard job. A job made even harder by the fact that most organizations don’t have development and test environments that are clean, easily reset and similar to the production environment. Enter virtualization…and Lab Manager. Lab manager allows you to define, configure and create complete development or test environments as needed. It can coordinate both physical and virtual environments, and comes with an incredibly powerful suite of effective tools that make managing environments simple and cost effective. Attend this webcast event to see Lab Manager in action!
Managing Requirements with Team Foundation Server 2010 Requirements management is a struggle for many organizations. A distinction must be drawn between requirements elicitation, requirements documentation and requirements management. Team Foundation Server provides rich capabilities for managing requirements and can easily be integrated with your preferred tools for documenting requirements. Best practices of requirement elicitation, documentation, management and traceability will be discussed in the context of the requirement lifecycle and how TFS 2010 and third party tools can maximize your overall requirements management process.
Overview of Visual Studio 2010 ALM Tools This overview of Visual Studio 2010 highlights the difference between Team System 2008 and Visual Studio 2010. Emphasis will be put on what migration steps need to be taken to maximize new features including testing tools, version control, work item tracking and build enhancements. As a basis for demonstration, the development processes and practices used to create Notion Tools for Team System will be shown, including branching models, build and deployment automation, custom reporting and workflows.
Streamlining Testing with  Visual Studio 2010 ALM Tools This Visual Studio 2010 overview features Visual Studio Test Elements 2010 testing tools including using the new Microsoft Test and Lab Manager to manage and automate your UI testing. The use of Test Lab will be discussed as a means of automating the creation of virtual environments for testing purposes. Deploying to VM environments during build will be demonstrated and facilitate a robust developer/tester lifecycle. For a taste of real-world use, the test plans and test process used to perform multi-platform testing of Notion Tools for Team System will be shown.
Using Team Foundation Server 2010 for Non-Windows Development This is an overview of best practices for utilizing Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 and the Teamprise Client Suite for development activities beyond Microsoft and the Windows platform. This webcast shows development teams using mixed and non-Microsoft platforms how to effectively leverage TFS 2010 to adopt work item tracking, version control, and automated build and test technologies.
Visual Studio 2010 Quality Tools for Developers This webcast event will demonstrate how developers use Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server to create high quality code, reliably reproduce and efficiently fix reported bugs, and truly work with the testing team. We’ll demonstrate the use of several important tools, such as test impact analysis, IntelliTrace, and other tools that help you understand your code, pinpoint bugs and efficiently fix them. Let’s face it – fixing bugs is both tedious and hard. VS 2010 provides the tools to both you and the tester to make finding, reproducing and fixing bugs dramatically simpler.
What’s New in Visual Studio 2010 Why you should consider Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010. We’re going to discuss the specific business value of the Visual Studio ALM tools now and later. Free webinar event to learn how to get the most out of the Visual Studio investments that your organization has made. You owe it to yourself to learn how this new solution will help you be a more productive in your role!

TODO Comments in Visual Studio

Using TODO

imageTODO comments allow you to tell Visual Studio to maintain a central list of tasks, which it reads from many different places in your code. The Task List is a panel or floating window in Visual Studio that will display all the TODO comments in your project. To open the list, go to View menu -> Task List.

Some example TODO comments

You probably have a lot of code that needs a lot of work. If you don’t, then you need to write code that needs a lot of work. Here are some examples of TODO lines that Visual Studio 2008 will notice and put into its special Task Pane.

//todo: your task 1
//TODO: your task 2
// Todo your task 3

Description of example. This will appear in your tasks pane as a separate task. Note that you have some flexibility with these tokens. The strings "todo", "TODO", and "TODO" all work equally well—Visual Studio’s parser gives you a little bit of freedom.

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Upgrade Guidance

The guide covers scenarios which may be encountered during and after the upgrade process. It provides examples of most common and potential issues. It covers scenarios related to general Upgrade Process, Work Item Templates, Reports, and Enterprise TFS Management (ETM). Although this guide refers to TFS 2008 scenarios, almost all the concepts apply also to TFS 2005.

Visual Studio ALM Rangers

This guidance is created by the Rangers who have the mission to provide out of band solutions for missing features or guidance. This content was created with support from Microsoft Product Group, Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (MVPs) and technical specialists from technology communities around the globe, giving you a real-world view from the field, where the technology has been tested and used.

What is in the package?
The download package consist of three seperate ZIP files containing a number of quick reference posters and quick reference sheets in XML Paper Specification (XPS) format:

  • Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – Overview (Default Download)
    • An overview of the guidance and focus areas, contained in one index table and overview quick reference poster.
  • Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – Basic Guidance
    • A collection of basic guidance sheets, focusing on the “what” are the key features and “why” to consider them.
  • Visual Studio 2010 Quick Reference Guidance – Supporting Guidance
    • A set of documents and quick reference posters, supporting the basic guidance sheets.

A single document with the seven upgrade scenarios, upgrade related questions and answers. Download your copy today!

Go http://vs2010upgradeguide.codeplex.com 

Free ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 Beta Hosting, help you get up to FOUR !

MaximumASP
MaximumASP is offering a free hosting account so you can get started with ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.
On this account you can test ASP.NET 4 applications in a hosting environment and try out the new publishing features with Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 / IIS 7.5
  • .NET Framework 4 Beta 2
  • 1GB disk space
  • 50 MB SQL Server 2008 database
  • MS Deploy Access
  • FTP over SSL Access

The environment on which your apps will be running is a slimmed down version of our robust MaxESP platform. Experience some of the platform’s features such as instant scaling, application aware load-balancing, and the IIS Remote Manager. If you like what you see during the ASP.NET 4 beta, sign up for a full account. We would love to have you.

http://aspnet4beta.maximumasp.com/