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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this first installment of performance tuning tricks for ASP.NET and IIS 7 we will look at some of the easy, yet powerful possibilities in the web.config file. By taking advantage of these few tricks we can increase the performance of any new or existing website without changing anything but the web.config file. [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

I recently had to come up with a good argument for upgrading a Windows Server 2003 to Windows 2008 R2. It is used as a web server, so the benefit I was looking for was the upgrade of IIS 6 to IIS 7.5. So I thought, why not make two deploys of the exact same website to both server editions and compare the performance. It so happens to be that there are many performance comparison articles about this floating around, but no one addressed the client-side aspect of the performance differences. I&r... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!