Download Pretty Paste now! One of the things that have annoyed me about Visual Studio for many years, is the inconsistency when pasting code copied from websites. Depending on the browser you get different results. Consider the code snippet below copied from one of Sayed’s blog posts. If I copy that from Internet Explorer and paste it into Visual Studio, this is what I get: And copied from Chrome result in this: As you can see, both browsers include the line numbers, but they interp... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Recently, a lot of people have asked for Intellisense support for AngularJS in the Visual Studio HTML editor. The bad news is that there is no extensibility for providing additional HTML attribute Intellisense, so I can’t ship this support in Web Essentials. The good news is that we can accomplish this through a more manual mechanism. Here’s what you need to do: Step 1 Find the file commonHTML5Types.xsd located in the Visual Studio install directory and back it up (just in case... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Today the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update was released. Go download it right now! It contains a lot of new and updated Visual Studio tooling features including: First class LESS editor Knockout.js Intellisense Paste JSON as classes CoffeeScript editor Mustache/Handlebars/JsRender syntax highlighting Page Inspector Live CSS auto-sync as you type JavaScript selection mapping and callstack Some of them are features that started their lives... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Nerd alert: This post is only for crazy website performance freaks. Proceed at your own risk. The holy grail for us crazy website performance freaks is to reach a perfect score of 100/100 in Google Page Speed without sacrificing important features of the website we’re building. One of those important features is Google Analytics. Gotta have Google Analytics, right?! Let’s say that you’ve optimized your website to the perfect score of 100/100 and now decide to add Google Analytics. Too bad, you... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

In the beginning of January, we released the Web Developer Checklist with great interest from the general web community. The checklist helps raising awareness of common best practices for building websites. It was always the plan to branch the checklist out into technology specific checklists to make it even easier to apply all the best practices. Today we’re excited to announce the first technology specific checklist – the ASP.NET Developer Checklist. It contains links to many ASP.NET specifi... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Rule #1 in website optimization is to enable GZip compression on the web server. This is very easy using web.config as explained here. However, some web servers have disabled automatic compression of JavaScript files, because they are served with the content type: application/x-javascript. For these web servers we can use a web.config trick to change the content type of JavaScript files to text/javascript. This is a completely valid content type supported by all browsers. Just paste the follo... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

Optimizing for website performance includes setting long expiration dates on our static resources, such s images, stylesheets and JavaScript files. Doing that tells the browser to cache our files so it doesn’t have to request them every time the user loads a page. This is one of the most important things to do when optimizing websites. In ASP.NET on IIS7+ it’s really easy. Just add this chunk of XML to the web.config’s <system.webServer> element: <staticContent>   <clien... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

So you just built a website and are about to make it public to the world. You go through a few checks to make sure that everything works as expected. Perhaps run HTML validation and other similar services. But are you sure you remembered to implement all the best practices? Does it look good on mobile devices, in Windows 8 snapped view and what about basic accessibility? Enter Web Developer Checklist We’ve tried to come up with the complete list of tasks and checks that every web developer s... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

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!