As I’m working on some of my demos for DevConnections next week I decided that some older demos I’ve had should be moved to Web Application Projects (WAP) rather than running on stock projects for consistency. I tend to use only WAP projects in production, but for demos I’ve often stuck with stock projects because they worked with Visual Web Developer Express. Now that SP1 has shipped though even VWD supports WAP projects (a big thanks for the ASP.NET team to making that happen!) and so there’s no need to use the stock project model any longer.. [More]

Scott has published a post about SP 1 beta for VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. You can read the post here and you can download the sp 1 beta here.. [More]

I'm playing around a little today with WPF again. One thing I like about WPF is the fact that you can take just about anything that you render on the canvas and dump it out as a bitmap file. Since it's fairly easy to create images and shapes in WPF I thought I'd create a quick form to created rounded corner bars, because one can never have enogh of those in Web applications ... Oh ok, so I have tools that do that shit, but I wanted to see what it takes to do this with WPF. A few hours later I got it working, but there were a few hiccups along the way. Here's what the end result looks like:. [More]

I've heard from several of my customers that have upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 that they've been unable to access custom controls on the toolbox. It doesn't matter whether the controls were auto-installed or manually added. According to several of the customers the controls simply show greyed out and apparently disabled so that they can't be accessed. You can't access the controls on the toolbox although standard controls work just fine.. [More]

I'm pretty happy with running VS 2008, especially since I've retrofitted my laptop with 4gig. But there are also a number of annoying bugs that occur rather frequently. This is especially frustrating because I pointed out a number of these during beta and they didn't get addressed. Let's see which ones you can identify with. [More]

I've been running Orcas quite a bit since Beta 1 was released in April and overall I'm pretty damn happy with this update to Visual Studio 2008. You may have noticed that I HAVEN'T posted a lot about Orcas issues and that's because overall Visual Studio Orcas and the feature set is working rather well for me. Microsoft has really done a much, much better job this time around to provide a sane set of updates to the framework as well as what amounts to an incremental update in Visual Studio.. [More]

've done the conversion once before but returned back to stock projects because of a Visual Web Developer requirement. Recently though development on the store has been a lot slower and I seriously find myself dreading updating the store because of the compilation and deployment hass.... [More]

I ran into an interesting issue a couple of days ago with the Orcas ASP.NET designer - I had several controls on the page that are marked as display:none (they get activated by AJAX calls) and the designer didn't show them. Now that's accurate rendering - except in this case I didn't want the the editor to actually render this way. In VS 2005 the editor actually shows any controls that are 'invisible' in a variety of ways.... [More]

PowerCommands is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2008 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE. The source code is included and requires the VS SDK for VS 2008 to allow modification of functionality or as a reference to create additional custom PowerCommand extensions.... [More]

Apparently, when a form/user control is inheriting from an abstract class it cannot be open for view in the designer. Haven't really looked up how and why this happens and why is it so hard for the designer to handle this kind of situation. What I did found is a nice work-around for the problem. Actually it's very simple, just go to the abstract class definition and modify it to look something like that.... [More]