Many Web Essentials users have requested a more formal process around nightly builds, that should result in a better delivery and update mechanism. To make it really easy to always run the latest and greatest, I’ve now created a custom feed for the Extensions and Updates dialog in Visual Studio 2012. Here’s how it works: Go to Tools > Options and open the the tab located under Environment –> Extensions and Updates. Click the Add button and type “Web Essentials ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

This release has some cool features, some tweaks to existing ones and some bug fixes. Let’s take a tour and then go download it. Automatic update to CSS schema files The W3C continues to evolve the CSS specification and so do all the browser vendors. It’s therefore important to always keep up-to-date with the changes to take full advantage of the web platform. Web Essentials now automatically downloads new schema files whenever there is a change. This is really cool, because Visual Studio wi... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

I was debating whether to call this release version 1.1 or 2.0 because it contains quite a lot of new functionality. I’ve decided to stick with 1.1 since it also features a lot of fixes and tweaks to the current functionality. Download it at the VS Gallery. Now, let’s take a tour of the new features. Option dialog This was the top requested feature from the original Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2010. It finally made it in. You can set the most important options through this dialog. If I... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

The CSS editor in Visual Studio has unprecedented support for both W3C standards and vendor specific properties, pseudos and @-directives. See the full list here. However, not all vendor specific prefixes are supported, just the major ones: -moz-, -ms-, -o- and -webkit-. In case you have to target really old versions of Safari, it would be nice to have -khtml- as well. Visual Studio 2012 makes it very easy to add support for new properties or to augment existing ones with additional values. An ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Today is a big day for all ASP.NET web developers. Both Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8 and Windows Server 8 is being released to MSDN subscribers. It is also the day that the first version of Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2012 is being released, or simply Web Essentials 2012. Download it here As we developed the brand new CSS editor in VS2012, we did it with extensibility in mind. The first Web Essentials for VS2010 already demonstrated what could be done with the old CSS editor, but we wan... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

I’ve been asked this question so many times lately, that a blog-post-answer seemed appropriate. There will be a Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2012! The original Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2010 quickly became popular amongst web developers in the fall of 2011, when it was first released. Primarily, I think, because it added a lot of missing functionality to the CSS editor. It made working with CSS less painful and more fun – like it should be. It was flawed, it was slow and it didn’t ... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Not everybody is able to upgrade to Visual Studio 2012 RC due to company policy or other reasons, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some of its CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 today. Whether or not you’ve got Web Standards Update installed or not, this is for you. We’ve been able to port some of the support from Visual Studio 2012 into a format that is understood by Visual Studio 2010, but a lot of it I’ve had to port manually. Before proceeding, you sho... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

I just attended the TechDays 2012 event in The Netherlands and now it is all over and I'm heading back to Seattle in the morning. I gave a couple of sessions and here are the slides I used:What's new in Visual Studio 11 and ASP.NET 4.5 Tips & tricks for ASP.NET developers (demo VS 2010 project) In the Tips & Tricks talk I demoed some of the extensions available for Visual Studio 2010. I've also done a Channel9 video specifically on those extensions. It's been great being back in... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

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]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

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]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!