We've had a few cases recently where customers are using third-party ASP.NET server controls (either written by a third-party company or by the customer) and finding that the controls are not rendering correctly in the Visual Studio 2008 design surface. Most recently, we had an issue where a popular...

Visual Studio has a cool user interface for publishing a website using the Publish Web Site dialog, accessible by selecting Build, Publish Web Site. You can use this dialog to pre-compile your website and avoid having to deploy source code. Visual Web Developer Express doesn't offer this dialog, but...

With the impending release of Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008, along with the .NET Framework 3.5, there is a bit of confusion around version numbers for ASP.NET. Before I get too far into this, let me just say right now that this post has little hope for clarifying things too much, but...

We recently announced the RTW of Visual Studio 2008 beta 2. What you might not know is that beta 2 also introduces the new Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2008. ASP.NET developers should be pretty excited about the new features, and this product will be available free once it RTMs. You can download...

A short while back, I blogged about the great new features in Orcas that ASP.NET developers will enjoy thanks to the incorporation of the Expression Web designer into Visual Studio. At that time, these features were set to debut in the February CTP version of Orcas which was slated to release in March...

Expression Web is Microsoft's latest web design tool. It should be no surprise to you that we put a lot of effort into making sure that Expression Web supported the design-time elements of ASP.NET 2.0. Doing so has proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a lot of ASP.NET developers who have...

I haven't blogged in a long time, partly because I've been very busy with other things, but mostly because I made the mistake of making this a debugging blog when I started it. Little did I know that one of the most prolific technical bloggers the world has ever known had already started a debugging...