If you’ve been using Web Deployment Projects in Visual Studio 2008 or 2005, you can upgrade to VS 2010 without hesitation now with the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects Beta. The power tool named “Web Deployment Projects” originally shipped as an out-of-band update for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 . This power tool provided a simplistic way to replace config sections and to integrate the ASP.NET pre-compiler and merge utilities into Visual Studio’s build process. Although Visual Studio 2010 includes a powerful new packaging and deployment technology based on MSDeploy, it is not backward compatible with the previous releases of Web Deployment Projects. To address this incompatibility we’ve ported the original Web Deployment Projects to VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4.0. With this refresh you’ll now be able to migrate your VS 2008 Web Deployment Projects to VS 2010.  

Installation

You can download Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects Beta from the download page (or simply click here to directly download the installer).  

Core WDP Features

Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects preserves all the core functionalities that Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects and Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects had... You can read more about this core functionalities in the VS 2005 WDP white paper on MSDN ... Also a tutorial on Web Deployment Projects VS 2005 can be found at Scottgu's blog . Similar to earlier versions of Web Deployment Projects (WDP), you can add a new WDP project using the ‘Add Web Deployment Project …’ item in the context menu of an existing website or web application project (WAP) in your solution (see figure 1). Figure 1 – Add Web Deployment Project   Migration from WDP for VS 2008 to WDP for VS 2010 When you open a solution containing a WDP project from an earlier version such as VS 2008, you will be presented with the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard. Just following the steps in this Conversion Wizard should have your WDP project migrated to WDP for VS 2010 with all your settings and configurations preserved. If you already went through the conversion process without installing WDP 2010, conversion would have failed for the WDP project alone and the project will be unloaded in Solution Explorer. Once you install WDP 2010, you can simply re-load the WDP project in Solution Explorer (see figure 2) to bring up the Conversion Wizard and migrate the WDP project to VS 2010. Figure 2 – Reload WDP project  

WDP for VS 2010 Enhancements

Multi-targeting support in WDP 2010 With the release of .NET 4 and the new 4.0 CLR, we now have two versions (2.0 and 4.0) of the compilation and merge tools (aspnet_compiler.exe and aspnet_merge.exe). When you do a “Build” of the Web Deployment Project, Visual Studio ensures that the correct version of these tools are invoked ...

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express is a free and robust development environment for building, testing and deploying Web applications across the Microsoft Web Platform including ASP.Net, Internet Information Services and SQL Server. Unleash your creativity with powerful design surfaces for building standards-based Web applications and services. With Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, you can work with Web Standards, JavaScript and ASP.NET. Work within a personalized environment, targeting established and emerging web technologies, including rich internet applications based on AJAX or Silverlight, cloud and web services. Integrated debugging tools let you find and fix bugs quickly and easily to help ensure high quality solutions. Visual Web Developer 2010 includes: MVC 2 JQuery 1.4 Microsoft AJAX Simplified Web Deployment Dynamic IntelliSense for JavaScript Snippets for HTML and ASPX files Silverlight 3 Powerful Design Surface for Silverlight XAML XAML Collaboration with Designers using Expression Blend Multi-monitor support …. Learn more about Visual Studio and ASP.Net 4.0 go here . The ASP.Net forum for Visual Studio 2010 is here . You can get started now by downloading Visual web Developer 2010 Express here . ...

Today we are announcing the availability of FREE HOSTING accounts for web developers to try out the new feature sets of Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, ASP.NET 4 Beta1 and Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (MsDeploy) RC1… VS 2010 has great set of features on deploying web applications seamlessly…   One of the key features is the ability to publish your web application from VS 2010 to a remote hosted web server along with its dependencies like SQL Server database using “Web 1-Click Publish”…  VS 2010 integrates Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (MsDeploy.exe) to provide fast, reliable and cohesive way of deploying web application… Learn more about Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Features … Apart from the web deployment feature set there are various other interesting features in ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 including enhancements in ASP.NET Core Services, AJAX, Web Forms, Dynamic Data, VS Web Designer and Editor…  To learn more about them check out ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 white paper …  VS 2010 and ASP 4 Beta1 release does not come with ASP.NET MVC yet, but we plan to include it in the near future… To allow you to try out all these cool features and deploy the ASP.NET Web Application using Web 1-Click Publish OrcsWeb and DiscountASP are providing free trial accounts (as long as they last :-))… Before I share the links to get the free trial account there are few important points to note: Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 (which comes with ASP.NET 4 Beta1 , Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (MsDeploy) RC1 and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition) is available to download for FREE from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx Read the Step by Step Walkthrough on Web 1-Click Publish with VS 2010 this will help you get started easily… These free trial accounts are provisioned with IIS 7 Web Site plus SQL Server 2008 database (and yes the database hosting is also FREE :-)) ASP.NET 4 Beta1 DOES NOT come with “Go Live” license… These accounts are sandboxed environments for you to try new technologies, please do not host production applications on these accounts… The free trial accounts are slotted to expire by October 31st 2009 so you have reasonable amount to try out the new technologies… So without any further delay let me share the links which will tell you how to grab one of these free accounts…  Click on the images below and get one for yourself before they run out:     OR  We want to hear from you about your feedback, thoughts, ideas on the new feature set; please feel free to use any of the below mechanisms to share your feedback… Visit Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 and ASP.NET 4 Beta1 Forum Write comments here, other announce or my blog … Follow on Twitter with #1ClickPublish … I hope you will use this offer and try out the new fascinating technologies coming down the pipeline… Enjoy ...

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has officially shipped! If you haven’t already, download a copy from here . What New with Visual Studio If you are new to Visual Studio 2010 please check out all our previous blogs to get a understanding of all the changes we made for Beta 1 including this intro blog on beta 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-10-and-asp-net-4-0-beta1.aspx What’s New with Beta 2 With this release the Web Tools team has introduced a number of great improvements. A number of these improvements are listed below. New Template Using the default ASP.NET web site template, projects now come with a pre-configured site. This template configures your site to use master and content pages. In addition, it has styles pre-defined and controls for login, register and changing your password.   If you do not want to use this template but would rather start from a empty state you can still use the “Empty Web Site” template. This creates a completely empty project that you will need to add a default web form to. Silverlight 3 Tooling Support IMPORTANT NOTE: If you already have Silverlight 3 SDK RTM version (not the GDR) installed on your box you will need to first uninstall it before running Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 setup. This is irrespective of the SDK language version and platform. The SDK GDR does not install on top of the RTM version of the SDK. This problem should be remedied by RTM. If you proceed with install in this state you will get an error at the end of install stating that the SDK failed to install. This error does not affect your setup of beta 2 for Visual Studio but you will still need uninstall to SDK RTM and re-install the SDK GDR if you wish to get the latest version of the SDK. Note that you can install the SL3 GDR SDK directly from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1ea49236-0de7-41b1-81c8-a126ff39975b . While Dev10 tooling for Beta 1 has Silverlight 2 features that worked with Silverlight 3, Beta 2 now re-introduces all the Silverlight 3 features directly into Visual Studio. Changes include: Support for configuring Out of browser (see screenshot below). Support for Transparent Platform Extensions. Page.xaml renamed to MainPage.xaml. Removal of support for Silverlight 2.    Parameterization of Web Packages VS will automatically parameterize the connection strings defined in the web.config and the destination virtual application name.  The users can specify customized parameters in parameters.xml file in the project directory as well, to parameterize configurations, such as WCF service’s end point etc. Import from web.config file for DB deployment ...

The multi-targeting feature of Visual Studio 2010 allows web developers to develop web applications targeting ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0. The key benefit of multi-targeting is that you can use Visual Studio 2010 to create and develop new projects that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework (such as 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5). Multi-targeting in VS 2010 also lets you continue to develop projects that were created using earlier versions of Visual Studio such as Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. What's different about Multi-targeting in Visual Studio 2010? We supported multi-targeting of web applications in Visual Studio 2008 as well. But the capabilities we had for multi-targeting in VS 2008 were really a pseudo form of multi-targeting, i.e. even though VS 2008 allowed us to target different versions of the ASP.NET framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5, the underlying Common Language Runtime (CLR) for all these frameworks is the same (= the .NET CLR 2.0). With the release of the new ASP.NET 4.0 Beta1 framework (that runs on top of the .NET CLR 4.0 that installs side-by-side with earlier versions of the .NET CLR) along with Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, we now have the ability in Visual Studio to target ASP.NET framework versions spanning multiple versions of the CLR (CLR 2.0 and CLR 4.0). VS 2010 can detect when your web project is targeting ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5 (that runs on top of CLR 2.0) versus targeting ASP.NET 4.0 (that runs on top of CLR 4.0). Accordingly: VS 2010 allows you to choose ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 or 4.0 as the target framework when you create a new Website or Web Application Project (WAP) Figure 1 You can convert and migrate your web applications built using earlier versions of Visual Studio to Visual Studio 2010. Like you could do with VS 2008, you can continue to have your web project target lower framework versions like ASP.NET 2.0 after conversion. See "Converting web projects from earlier versions of Visual Studio" section below for details. Visual Studio automatically filters controls in toolbox, and types in intellisense and properties window based on the ASP.NET framework version being targeted Compilation and building of the web project works correctly based on the target framework, ie. VS 2010 will show errors when you try to use 4.0 controls or properties in a web project targeting 2.0 or 3.5. You can change targets from one ASP.NET framework to the other via the property pages (as you could in VS 2008). Note: In VS 2010, we prompt you to reload the project when you change the target framework of a website project (VS 2008 used to do this for WAP projects). This is to ensure that the references are updated correctly when you change the target. New capabilities in VS 2010: We already had the above multi-targeting capabilities in VS 2008. VS 2010 extends these capabilities to handle ASP.NET 4.0 (and the new CLR 4.0). Additio ...

This post introduces you to a small improvement that has been made in Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4 to reduce the size of the ASP.NET application level web.config 3.0 and 3.5 web.config As ASP.NET technology evolved, the application level Web.config had new things added to it. Since the earlier frameworks were using the same set of machine level configuration files, incremental feature that was added subsequent to the 2.0 release resulted in additional config settings included in the file. .NET 4 web.config With .NET 4, the web.config is tremendously reduced in size to improve the simplicity  of ASP.NET The config settings have been moved down to the machine config file. This includes registers all of the ASP.NET tag sections, handlers, modules and settings for the following: ASP.NET AJAX ASP.NET Dynamic Data ASP.NET Routing ASP.NET Chart Control You can look at the trimmed down web.config by creating a .Net 4 'ASP.NET Empty Web Application' in Visual Studio 2010. Following is the web.config file for .NET 4 C# 'ASP.NET Empty Web Application':     The config file above has settings to tell ASP.NET to enable debugging by default for the application and provides the version of .NET framework to use.(Please read the post http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/09/30/visual-studio-2010-property-grid-filtering.aspx to find out why targetFramework version attribute should not be updated manually)   Hope this helps, Deepak Verma | Visual Web Developer ...

Updated Web Marketing Association’ Internet Standards Assessment Report Includes Historical Data Derived from a Decade of Hosting Internet Award Competition, WebAwards, and Provides Best Practices for Fashion Web DesignSource: Read more Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:01:00 GMT Tags: Assessment Report, Association Internet, Award Competition, Best Practices, Decade, Fashion Design, Fashion Trends, Fashion Web, Gmt, Hosting [...] Related posts: Best Investment Web Site Trends Detailed in New Report from the Web Marketing Association (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Updated Web Marketing Association’ Internet Standards Assessment Report includes historical... Best Professional Services Web Site Trends Detailed in New Report from the Web Marketing Association (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Updated Web Marketing Association’ Internet Standards Assessment Report Includes Historical... Best B2B Website Trends Detailed in New Report from the Web Marketing Association (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Updated Web Marketing Association’ Internet Standards Assessment Report Includes Historical... Best B2B Website Trends Detailed in New Report from the Web Marketing Association (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Updated Web Marketing Association’ Internet Standards Assessment Report Includes Historical... Best B2B Website Trends Detailed in New Report from the Web Marketing Association (PRWeb via Yahoo! News) Updated Web Marketing Association’ Internet Standards Assessment Report Includes Historical... ...

[In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] Technical debates are discussed endlessly within the blog-o-sphere/twitter-verse, and they range across every developer community. Each language, framework, tool, and platform inevitably has at least a few going on at any particular point in time. Below are a few observations I?ve made over the years about technical debates in general, as well as some comments about some of the recent discussions I?ve seen recently about the topic of ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC in particular.

General Observations About Technical Debates

Below are a few general observations independent of any specific technical debate: a) Developers love to passionately debate and compare languages, frameworks, APIs, and tools.  This is true in every programming community (.NET, Java, PHP, C++, Ruby, Python, etc).  I think you can view these types of religious technical debates in two ways: They are sometimes annoying and often a waste of time. They are often a sign of a healthy and active community (since passion means people care deeply on both sides of a debate, and is far better than apathy). Personally I think both points are true. b) There is never only ?one right way? to develop something. As an opening interview question I sometimes ask people to sort an array of numbers in the most efficient way they can.  Most people don?t do well with it.  This is usually not because they don?t know sort algorithms, but rather because they never think to ask the scenarios and requirements behind it ? which is critical to understanding the most efficient way to do it.  How big is the sequence of numbers? How random is the typical number sequence (is it sometimes already mostly sorted, how big is the spread of numbers, are the numbers all unique, do duplicates cluster together)? How parallel is the computer architecture?  Can you allocate memory as part of the sort or must it be constant?  Etc. These are important questions to ask because the most efficient and optimal way to sort an array of numbers depends on understanding the answers.  Whenever people assert that there is only ?one right way? to a programming problem they are almost always assuming a fixed set of requirements/scenarios/inputs ? which is rarely optimal for every scenario or every developer.  And to state the obvious - most problems in programming are far more complex than sorting an array of numbers. c) Great developers using bad tools/frameworks can make great apps. Bad developers using great tools/frameworks can make bad apps. Be very careful about making broad assumptions (good or bad) about the quality of the app you are building based on the tools/frameworks used. d) Developers (good and bad) can grow stronger by stretching themselves and lear ...

Prior to the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, the only way to upgrade an ASP.Net MVC 1 application to ASP.Net MVC 2 was to use Eilon Lipton’s tool . With the release of Visual Studio 2010 you will now be able to open your MVC 1 projects in Visual Studio 2010 and upgrade them to ASP.Net MVC 2 projects. Also, you can upgrade the target framework of the project to 4.0 or continue to target the 3.5 framework. When you first open an ASP.Net MVC 1 application in Visual Studio 2010, you will see the familiar Visual Studio Conversion Wizard.   ASP.Net MVC specific code runs during this wizard and updates all System.Web.MVC references from version 1 to version 2. The wizard also updates the version numbers in the project’s Web.config and the Views folder’s Web.config. The project guid is also updated to the MVC 2 project guid so you will now be able to take advantage of Add Area while working on your application. If you upgrade your project to 4.0, the project system will also upgrade System.Web.Routing and System.Web.Abstractions to 4.0 and modify the references in the project’s Web.config. At this point, you should be able to build and run your project. What about class libraries and Visual Studio Test projects in my solution? Unless you are using Visual Web Developer Express, the ASP.Net MVC upgrade wizard code does not upgrade your class libraries to the 4.0 framework, so make sure to upgrade them in the project properties if you choose to target the 4.0 framework when upgrading your ASP.Net MVC Application. Also you should check to make sure that class library references to System.Web.Abstractions and System.Web.Routing point to the version in the gac, now that these two assemblies are part of the 4.0 framework. Visual Studio Test projects do not support multi-targeting but for solutions with ASP.Net MVC applications they can be migrated to 4.0 along with your MVC Application. If you are using C#, your VS Test project will upgrade to 4.0 regardless of whether you upgrade your ASP.Net MVC 2 Application and your project will build and run whether you target 3.5 or 4.0. Visual Basic test projects will prompt for an upgrade to 4.0 so choose according to which framework you wish to target for your ASP.Net MVC app. In other words, don’t upgrade your app to 4.0 and not upgrade your test project or vice versa. Hope this helps you get your ASP.Net MVC apps up and running in Dev10! Joe Cartano | Visual Web Developer ...

Learn ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC from scratch.

Discount ASP.Net has updated their Hosting Sandbox for Visual Studio 2010 RC and ASP.NET 4.0 RC. http://www.discountasp.net/press/2010_02_16_free-asp.net-4.0-RC-hosting.aspx To learn more about the new Web Deployment features in Visual Studio 2010 check out this Step by Step Walkthrough on Web 1-Click Publish with VS 2010 To provide feedback on the RC please visit the Visual Studio Connect site .  You can also contact the Web Tooling team directly by sending mail to vsweb@microsoft.com Bradley Bartz | Visual Web Developer

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large % of traffic to sites now comes directly from search engines, and improving your site?s search relevancy will lead to more users visiting your site from search engine queries.  This can directly or indirectly increase the money you make through your site. This blog post covers how you can use the free Microsoft URL Rewrite Extension to fix a bunch of common SEO problems that your site might have.  It takes less than 15 minutes (and no code changes) to apply 4 simple URL Rewrite rules to your site, and in doing so cause search engines to drive more visitors and traffic to your site.  The techniques below work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based sites.  They also works with all versions of ASP.NET (and even work with non-ASP.NET content). [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Measuring the SEO of your website with the Microsoft SEO Toolkit

A few months ago I blogged about the free SEO Toolkit that we?ve shipped.  This useful tool enables you to automatically crawl/scan your site for SEO correctness, and it then flags any SEO issues it finds.  I highly recommend downloading and using the tool against any public site you work on.  It makes it easy to spot SEO issues you might have in your site, and pinpoint ways to optimize it further. Below is a simple example of a report I ran against one of my sites ( www.scottgu.com ) prior to applying the URL Rewrite rules I?ll cover later in this blog post:  

Search Relevancy and URL Splitting

Two of the important things that search engines evaluate when assessing your site?s ?search relevancy? are: How many other sites link to your content.  Search engines assume that if a lot of people around the web are linking to your content, then it is likely useful and so weight it higher in relevancy. The uniqueness of the content it finds on your site.  If search engines find that the content is duplicated in multiple places around the Internet (or on multiple URLs on your site) then it is likely to drop the relevancy of the content. One of the things you want to be very careful to avoid when building public facing sites is to not allow different URLs to retrieve the same content within your site.  Doing so will hurt with both of the situations above.  In particular, allowing external sites to link to the same content with multiple URLs will cause your link-count and page-ranking to be split up across those different URLs (and so give you a smaller page rank than what it would otherwise be if it was just one URL).  Not allowing external sites to link to you in different ways sounds easy in ...

It’s a brand new week, which means it’s time for Mashable’s guide to upcoming social media and web events, parties and conferences. For more upcoming event listings, check out Mashable’s Events section . Is your event not on this list? Contact us at least one month before your event to establish a media partnership. Mashable’s Weekly Social Media and Marketing Event Guide is proudly supported by Eventbrite , the Web’s Event Marketplace. April 5, 2010, New York, NY: You need to be a social media specialist. Today’s marketplace demands it. Content, regardless of medium or platform, is regularly created, curated, commented upon and shared by consumers. If you’re not strategizing to maximize the social component, you’re missing prime opportunities. Register for the IAB Social Media Marketplace to gain insights from Federated Media’s John Battelle, MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard, Del Monte’s Doug Chavez, Deep Focus’s Ian Schafer, GE’s Andrew Markowitz and more. Use code mashable to save $100. April 7, 2010, Cincinnati, OH: BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media features eight great case studies on the best social media programs at large corporations. AT&T, Dell, Duke Energy, General Mills, Hilton, Procter & Gamble, Rogers Communications and Tyson Foods share case studies in corporate social media. You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks and make your social media program phenomenal. From GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council. Get $39 off registration by using the code ILoveMashable. April 7, 2010, New York, NY: Attend the Social Media Advertising Consortium’s April NYC Salon . Join SMAC members for a lively discussion on how brands are organized around social media. A panel of agencies and top brands including IBM and PepsiCo will share insights, best practices, campaign successes and discuss what’s next in measurement and research. Discussion followed by networking, wine and light hors d’oeuvres. The cost is free for SMAC members and $45 for non-members. Mention Mashable when registering to save 10%. Space is limited so register early. April 7-8, 2010, New York, NY: Strengthen your business with mobile marketing, apps, video and content at Think Mobile, a conference focused on mobile strategy, marketing and mobile apps. Learn how to get your brand in front of the right customers, handle mobile content and make money in mobile. The full day dedicated to mobile apps will cover building an app team, designing user interfaces, marketing your app and targeting development for specific platforms. Speakers represent AdMob, Pandora, Nielsen, Bravo, PCMag.com and more. Register with promo code TMMASH and save 20%! April 7-9, 2010 Sydney, Australia: ConnectNow is a three day event focusing on the intersection of social media, emerging technologies and enterprise. A conference takes place on the first two days, where you’ll learn from ...

It’s a brand new week, which means it’s time for Mashable’s guide to upcoming social media and web events, parties and conferences. For more upcoming event listings, check out Mashable’s Events section . Is your event not on this list? Contact us at least one month before your event to establish a media partnership. Mashable’s Weekly Social Media and Marketing Event Guide is proudly supported by Eventbrite , the Web’s Event Marketplace. April 5, 2010, New York, NY: You need to be a social media specialist. Today’s marketplace demands it. Content, regardless of medium or platform, is regularly created, curated, commented upon and shared by consumers. If you’re not strategizing to maximize the social component, you’re missing prime opportunities. Register for the IAB Social Media Marketplace to gain insights from Federated Media’s John Battelle, MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard, Del Monte’s Doug Chavez, Deep Focus’s Ian Schafer, GE’s Andrew Markowitz and more. Use code mashable to save $100. April 7, 2010, Cincinnati, OH: BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media features eight great case studies on the best social media programs at large corporations. AT&T, Dell, Duke Energy, General Mills, Hilton, Procter & Gamble, Rogers Communications and Tyson Foods share case studies in corporate social media. You’ll learn how to get started, get past roadblocks and make your social media program phenomenal. From GasPedal and the Social Media Business Council. Get $39 off registration by using the code ILoveMashable. April 7, 2010, New York, NY: Attend the Social Media Advertising Consortium’s April NYC Salon . Join SMAC members for a lively discussion on how brands are organized around social media. A panel of agencies and top brands including IBM and PepsiCo will share insights, best practices, campaign successes and discuss what’s next in measurement and research. Discussion followed by networking, wine and light hors d’oeuvres. The cost is free for SMAC members and $45 for non-members. Mention Mashable when registering to save 10%. Space is limited so register early. April 7-8, 2010, New York, NY: Strengthen your business with mobile marketing, apps, video and content at Think Mobile, a conference focused on mobile strategy, marketing and mobile apps. Learn how to get your brand in front of the right customers, handle mobile content and make money in mobile. The full day dedicated to mobile apps will cover building an app team, designing user interfaces, marketing your app and targeting development for specific platforms. Speakers represent AdMob, Pandora, Nielsen, Bravo, PCMag.com and more. Register with promo code TMMASH and save 20%! April 7-9, 2010 Sydney, Australia: ConnectNow is a three day event focusing on the intersection of social media, emerging technologies and enterprise. A conference takes place on the first two days, where you’ll learn from ...

The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available.

Download and Install Today

MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark / BizSpark / DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center.  If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010 .  Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out).  If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page).

What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4

Today?s release is a big one ? and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better.  What this means is that you don?t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release.  There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them.  Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE   Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate).  It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used.  It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow.  The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense . The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging.  VS 2010?s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications.  And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster . TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and cont ...

It’s a brand new week, which means it’s time for Mashable’s guide to upcoming social media and web events, parties, and conferences. For more upcoming event listings, check out Mashable’s Events section . Is your event not on this list? Contact us at least one month before your event and let’s establish a media partnership. Mashable’s Weekly Social Media and Marketing Event Guide is proudly supported by Eventbrite , the Web’s Event Marketplace. March 29, 2010, Portland, OR: The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. One day, 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford, Comcast, Nike and many more. As well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code mashable for 15% off. March 30, 2010, London, UK: The upcoming Hit Me! Social Media and Search event is designed for business owners and entrepreneurs who want to find out the latest practical business advice and information about Social Media and Search. Freshbusinessthinking.com has partnered with Microsoft to deliver this power-packed one day event featuring experts and leading practitioners from the world of social media and search. Stats published by Nielsen show that social media usage has increased by 82% in the last year. The challenge for organisations of all sizes is how to use social media to drive business. Over 1500 delegates have attended our one-day events and the average rating is 8.5 out of 10 – the next one is shaping up to be the best ever with a host of experts on hand to give you the information and advice you need to grow your business online. Mashable readers: get a discount entering promotional code MASHABLE. March 30-April 1, 2010, San Jose, CA: Become Location Enabled at Where 2.0. Now in its sixth year, Where 2.0 is one of the world’s foremost events dedicated to exploring the emerging technologies in the geospatial industry. At Where 2.0, we expose the tools pushing the boundaries of the location frontier. Join us and meet the people behind the mashups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial. Find out what’s viable now, what’s lurking just below the radar and how to gain a competitive edge. Register now and save 15% at en.oreilly.com/where2010 . Use code whr10mash. April 5, 2010, New York, NY: You need to be a social media specialist. Today’s marketplace demands it. Content, regardless of medium or platform, is regularly created, curated, commented upon and shared by consumers. If you’re not strategizing to maximize the social component, you’re missing prime opportunities. Register for the IAB Social Media Marketplace to gain insights from Federated Media’s John Battelle, MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard, Del Monte’s Doug Chavez, Deep Focus’s Ian Schafer, GE’s And ...

It’s a brand new week, which means it’s time for Mashable’s guide to upcoming social media and web events, parties, and conferences. For more upcoming event listings, check out Mashable’s Events section . Is your event not on this list? Contact us at least one month before your event and let’s establish a media partnership. Mashable’s Weekly Social Media and Marketing Event Guide is proudly supported by Eventbrite , the Web’s Event Marketplace. March 29, 2010, Portland, OR: The social media conference for marketers, Social Fresh is not about concept, but focused purely on case studies from the front lines. Learn what social media can really do for business bottom lines. One day, 35 speakers from companies like Intel, Ford, Comcast, Nike and many more. As well as keynote Peter Shankman. Register now and use coupon code mashable for 15% off. March 30, 2010, London, UK: The upcoming Hit Me! Social Media and Search event is designed for business owners and entrepreneurs who want to find out the latest practical business advice and information about Social Media and Search. Freshbusinessthinking.com has partnered with Microsoft to deliver this power-packed one day event featuring experts and leading practitioners from the world of social media and search. Stats published by Nielsen show that social media usage has increased by 82% in the last year. The challenge for organisations of all sizes is how to use social media to drive business. Over 1500 delegates have attended our one-day events and the average rating is 8.5 out of 10 – the next one is shaping up to be the best ever with a host of experts on hand to give you the information and advice you need to grow your business online. Mashable readers: get a discount entering promotional code MASHABLE. March 30-April 1, 2010, San Jose, CA: Become Location Enabled at Where 2.0. Now in its sixth year, Where 2.0 is one of the world’s foremost events dedicated to exploring the emerging technologies in the geospatial industry. At Where 2.0, we expose the tools pushing the boundaries of the location frontier. Join us and meet the people behind the mashups, the people behind the platforms, and the people looking ahead to the future of geospatial. Find out what’s viable now, what’s lurking just below the radar and how to gain a competitive edge. Register now and save 15% at en.oreilly.com/where2010 . Use code whr10mash. April 5, 2010, New York, NY: You need to be a social media specialist. Today’s marketplace demands it. Content, regardless of medium or platform, is regularly created, curated, commented upon and shared by consumers. If you’re not strategizing to maximize the social component, you’re missing prime opportunities. Register for the IAB Social Media Marketplace to gain insights from Federated Media’s John Battelle, MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard, Del Monte’s Doug Chavez, Deep Focus’s Ian Schafer, GE’s And ...

Already know how to code C# 2008 desktop applications? Then, you’re ready to master web programming with the 3.5 edition of this best-selling ASP.NET book from Murach Books. It covers the 3.5 features that provide new functionality…like the ListView and DataPager data controls, LINQ data sources, new CSS-related tools, and ASP.NET AJAX…while it teaches you [...] Murach’s ASP.NET 3.5 Web Programming with C# 2008 is a post from: .NET Answers

[ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ] This is the nineteenth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release. Today?s post covers a small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 ? which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax.

HTML Encoding

Cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML encoding attacks are two of the most common security issues that plague web-sites and applications.  They occur when hackers find a way to inject client-side script or HTML markup into web-pages that are then viewed by other visitors to a site.  This can be used to both vandalize a site, as well as enable hackers to run client-script code that steals cookie data and/or exploits a user?s identity on a site to do bad things. One way to help mitigate against cross-site scripting attacks is to make sure that rendered output is HTML encoded within a page.  This helps ensures that any content that might have been input/modified by an end-user cannot be output back onto a page containing tags like <script> or <img> elements.  How to HTML Encode Content Today ASP.NET applications (especially those using ASP.NET MVC) often rely on using <%= %> code-nugget expressions to render output.  Developers today often use the Server.HtmlEncode() or HttpUtility.Encode() helper methods within these expressions to HTML encode the output before it is rendered.  This can be done using code like below: While this works fine, there are two downsides of it: It is a little verbose Developers often forget to call the Server.HtmlEncode method ? and there is no easy way to verify its usage across an app

New <%: %> Code Nugget Syntax

With ASP.NET 4 we are introducing a new code expression syntax (<%:  %>) that renders output like <%= %> blocks do ? but which also automatically HTML encodes it before doing so.  This eliminates the need to explicitly HTML encode content like we did in the example above.  Instead, you can just write the more concise code below to accomplish the exact same thing: We chose the <%: %> syntax so that it would be easy to quickly replace existing instances of <%= %> code blocks.  It also enables you to easily search your code-base for <%= %> elements to find and verify any cases where you are not using HTML encoding within your application to ensure that you have the correct behavior.

Avoiding Double Encoding

While HTML encoding content is oft ...

1) Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework The ASP.NET MVC Framework is the latest evolution of Microsoft’s ASP.NET web platform. It introduces a radically new high–productivity programming model that promotes cleaner code architecture, test–driven development, and powerful extensibility, combined with all the benefits of ASP.NET 3.5. An integral benefit of this book is that the core Model–View–Controller architectural [...] Top Ten ASP.NET Books is a post from: .NET Answers

This is the twentieth in a series of blog posts I?m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today?s blog post covers some of the nice improvements coming with JavaScript intellisense with VS 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.  You?ll find with VS 2010 that JavaScript Intellisense loads much faster for large script files and with large libraries, and that it now provides statement completion support for more advanced scenarios compared to previous versions of Visual Studio. [ In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu ]

Improved JavaScript Intellisense

Providing Intellisense for a dynamic language like JavaScript is more involved than doing so with a statically typed language like VB or C#.  Correctly inferring the shape and structure of variables, methods, etc is pretty much impossible without pseudo-executing the actual code itself ? since JavaScript as a language is flexible enough to dynamically modify and morph these things at runtime.  VS 2010?s JavaScript code editor now has the smarts to perform this type of pseudo-code execution as you type ? which is how its intellisense completion is kept accurate and complete.  Below is a simple walkthrough that shows off how rich and flexible it is with the final release.

Scenario 1: Basic Type Inference

When you declare a variable in JavaScript you do not have to declare its type.  Instead, the type of the variable is based on the value assigned to it.  Because VS 2010 pseudo-executes the code within the editor, it can dynamically infer the type of a variable, and provide the appropriate code intellisense based on the value assigned to a variable. For example, notice below how VS 2010 provides statement completion for a string (because we assigned a string to the ?foo? variable): If we later assign a numeric value to ?foo? the statement completion (after this assignment) automatically changes to provide intellisense for a number:

Scenario 2: Intellisense When Manipulating Browser Objects

It is pretty common with JavaScript to manipulate the DOM of a page, as well as work against browser objects available on the client.  Previous versions of Visual Studio would provide JavaScript statement completion against the standard browser objects ? but didn?t provide much help with more advanced scenarios (like creating dynamic variables and methods).  VS 2010?s pseudo-execution of code within the editor now allows us to provide rich intellisense for a much broader set of scenarios. For example, below we are using the browser?s window object to create a global variable named ?bar?.  Notice how we can now get intellisense (with correct type inference for a string) with VS 2010 when we later try and use it: ...

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the important considerations that any Internet web-site needs to design with in mind.  A non-trivial percentage of Internet traffic to sites is driven by search engines, and good SEO techniques can help increase site traffic even further. Likewise, small mistakes can significantly impact the search relevance of your site?s content and cause you to miss out on the traffic that you should be receiving.  Some of these mistakes include: multiple URLs on a site leading to the same content, broken links from a page, poorly chosen titles, descriptions, and keywords, large amounts of viewstate, invalid markup, etc.  These mistakes are often easy to fix - the challenge is how to discover and pinpoint them within a site.

Introducing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it. You can install the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer I blogged about earlier this week.  You can install it through WebPI using the ?install now? link on the IIS SEO Toolkit home .  Once installed, you?ll find a new ?Search Engine Optimization? section within the IIS 7 admin tool, and several SEO tools available within it: The Robots and SiteMap tools enable you to easily create and manage robots.txt and sitemap.xml files for your site that help guide search engines on what URLs they should and shouldn?t crawl and follow. The Site Analysis tool enables you to crawl a site like a search engine would, and then analyze the content using a variety of rules that help identify SEO, Accessibility, and Performance problems within it.

Using the IIS SEO Toolkit?s Site Analysis Tool

Let?s take a look at how we can use the Site Analysis tool to quickly review SEO issues with a site.  To avoid embarrassing anyone else by turning the tool loose on their site, I?ve decided to instead use the analysis tool on one of my own sites: www.scottgu.com .  This is a site I wrote many years ago (last update in 2005 I think).  If you install the IIS SEO Toolkit you can point it at my site and duplicate the steps below to drill into the SEO analysis of it. Open the Site Analysis Tool We?ll begin by launching the IIS Admin Tool (inetmgr) and clicking on the root node in the left-pane tree-view of the IIS7 admin tool (the machine name ? in this case ?Scottgu-PC?).  We?ll then select the ?Site Analysis? icon within the Search Engine Optimization section on the right.  Opening the Site Analysis tool at the machine level like this will allow us to run the analysis tool against any remote server (if we had instead opened it with a site selected then we would only be able to run ...

Enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits and features: - Separation of concerns and application tasks (input logic, business logic, and UI logic) - Testability (support for Test-Driven Development) - Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript - Intuitive URLs through a URL-mapping component - Extensible and pluggable: the components of the ASP.NET MVC framework are designed so that they can be replaced or customized - Support for existing ASP.NET features (forms authentication, Windows authentication, URL authorization, membership and roles, output and data caching, session and profile state management, health monitoring, the configuration system, and the provider architecture) Categories: ASP.NET MVC more about ASP.NET MVC

Enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET framework. ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits and features: - Separation of concerns and application tasks (input logic, business logic, and UI logic) - Testability (support for Test-Driven Development) - Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript - Intuitive URLs through a URL-mapping component - Extensible and pluggable: the components of the ASP.NET MVC framework are designed so that they can be replaced or customized - Support for existing ASP.NET features (forms authentication, Windows authentication, URL authorization, membership and roles, output and data caching, session and profile state management, health monitoring, the configuration system, and the provider architecture) Categories: ASP.NET MVC more about ASP.NET MVC