Writing correct CSS can sometimes feel a little frustrating – especially with all the vendor specific properties and cross-browser techniques we need to be aware of. CSSCop for Visual Studio tries to help us write better CSS, by making sure we remember all the right vendor specific properties or that you cannot set the margin on inline HTML elements etc. CSSCop uses the best CSS linting tool available today – CSS Lint. Like FxCop will frustrate you the first time you run it, so promises CSS L... [More]

I’ve been pretty quiet about my latest extension for Visual Studio 2010 outside of Twitter, so I’m thinking it’s due time for a blog post about how and why Web Essentials came to be. If you don’t know what Web Essentials is or haven’t tried it yet, you might want to read Scott Hanselman’s blog post. Web Essentials was originally called CSS Essentials when it was first released in early 2011 because I wanted a name that clearly stated it was all about CSS. Ye... [More]

For the past few months, I’ve been looking at how to improve the web development experience in Visual Studio. This summer I released the Web Standards Update which brings HTML5 and CSS3 to Visual Studio, and a few weeks back Web Essentials was published. This week I’ve been working on a proof of concept that eliminates the need for typing curly braces, colons and semi-colons when working with CSS. In non-English keyboard layouts, these characters can be rather difficult to type, because you ne... [More]

At //build and today at VS Live I gave a talk about performance optimizing ASP.NET web applications using bundling, minification and other cool tricks. See the video presentation The Visual Studio 2010 extension I used were:Web Essentials Image Optimizer Web Standards Update The demo website can now be downloaded here. It runs in ASP.NET 4.0 Optimize Website.zip (4.39 mb)

We just released the first Web Standards Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Despite its name, the update also works for Visual Web Developer Express 2010 SP1. You can read more on our team blog. In this first release of the update, we have focused on bringing the HTML5 support up-to-date, adding CSS 3 support and bring more new API’s to the JavaScript intellisense.  The plan is to make a release on a regular schedule to keep Visual Studio updated with the changes made by W3C. HT... [More]

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta last month, there has been a lot of questions regarding the support for HTML5 and CSS3. HTML5 Visual Studio 2010 was originally released without HTML5 support, so does SP1 finally add support for it? Yes, to some extent. The entire HTML5 specification isn’t supported but most of the new elements and attributes are. That means you get both intellisense and validation for HTML5 with SP1. Turn it on After installing SP1 you have to tell Vis... [More]

HTML5 and CSS3 introduces some new file types that enables us to create even better websites. We are now able to embed video, audio and custom fonts natively to any web page. Some of these file types are relatively new and not supported by the IIS web server by default. It’s file types like .m4v, .webm and .woff. When a request is made to the IIS for these unsupported file types, we are met with the following error message: HTTP Error 404.3 - Not Found The page you are requesting cannot be se... [More]

The Image Optimizer extension for Visual Studio is now ready for prime time. Therefore I've done a brief video demo of how it actually works. [More]

Most web developers know the importance of optimizing images for faster page loading times, but it’s also a very cumbersome, time consuming and boring process. Then when you are done, the customer or designer gives you new images to use and you can start the process over and over and over again. The result is that we spend a lot of time optimizing images and also forget to do it from time to time. That’s why I’ve been experimenting with a way to automate the process of optimiz... [More]

In part 1 of this series, we looked at some tricks to optimize the performance of any website running in IIS 7 by only modifying the web.config. In this part we will focus on handling browser caching issues and optimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files loaded from an ASP.NET website. NB! All the code (a single .cs file of 125 lines) is included in the zip file at the bottom of this post. Browser caching In part 1, we looked at how it was possible to set an expiration header to any stati... [More]