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!

I’ve used Google’s Page Speed plug-in for Firebug a lot since it was released last year. Even though it’s not as good as Yahoo’s YSlow plug-in, it’s still very usable for some scenarios YSlow doesn’t support – my favorite being the analysis of unused CSS and selector optimizations. It also has a feature that will tell you how much your web page will gain by minifying the HTML. Not only does it analyze the difference but it can also generate an optimiz... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!

At the Mix10 conference, the Windows Phone 7 teams had some very big announcements – a lot of it had been kept secret and first revealed to the public now. There is however still some details they keep secret. Some of these secrets are the user agents of Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 7, which they simply wouldn’t give us. After playing with Windows Phone 7 we managed to secure a copy of the user agent string. The user agent for IE on Windows Phone 7 running on the Asus Galaxy d... [More]* $4.95/month ASP.NET Hosting with FREE SQL 2012 DB! – Click Here!