Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Web Developer : Anh Phan

Tip #80: Did you know… How to show JScript validation errors as warnings?

WebDevTools — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:54:00 GMT

With Visual Studio 2008 RTM, JScript validation setting is an option on the HTML validation page on the Options dialog. Since Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and later, we added a new option page JScript on the Options dialog, see the blog "Introducing JScript Formatting in VS 2008 SP1" for more detail. With this change, now the JScript validation resides on its own tab "Miscellaneous" as shown below:

To view JScript errors as warnings, we need to launch Options dialog from Tool -> Options menu, then expand Text Editor -> JScript -> Miscellaneous, check the checkbox "Show errors as warnings". Some users like to have JScript syntax errors shown in the Error List since it would encourage standard compliance, while others don't like to deal with validation errors since they are browser errors.

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip# 78: Did you know… How to navigate using Document Outline?

WebDevTools — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:08:00 GMT

Document Outline window can be launched from the menu View -> Document Outline, or via short cut key Ctrl-Alt-T. The Document Outline window displays a nested, hierarchical tree of the elements and scripts on the page. It gives you a good overview of the page's content and its layout.

Double-clicking any element listed in the Document Outline window will highlight the corresponding markup for that element in the source view or the element display in the design view, depending on which view is currently open. This is very helpful in navigating a large, complex page.

More about Document Outline can be found here.

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip # 52: Did you know... When deploying your ASP.NET web application, debug=false should be set in web.config

WebDevTools — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 21:50:00 GMT

To help troubleshoot problems, developers usually enables the debug mode in web.config file. This causes ASP.NET to produce extra information in the compiled assemblies such as debug symbols, metadata. However, performance will be suffered as it takes longer to compile and run, consumes more memory and resource caching is not performed. Therefore, in production, we should set the debugging option back to false to avoid the effect on performance. There are two ways to achieve this.

1) In web.config file, set <compilation debug=”false”/>

2) You can also disable the <compilation debug=”true”/> switch for all ASP.NET applications on the system in production by setting the following in Machine.config:

    <system.web>
        <deployment retail=”true”/>
    </system.web>

The setting in machine.config will also turn off trace output in a page and detailed error messages remotely. More information about this switch can be found here.

machine.config file is typically located at %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\%VersionNumber%\CONFIG.

Thanks,
Anh Phan
SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip # 30: Did you know... Ajax Extender controls UI behaves differently in VS 2008 than in VS 2005

WebDevTools — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 23:12:00 GMT

In VS 2005, you can drag and drop an extender control anywhere on the design surface. However, in VS 2008, you can drop an extender only on an ASP control which the extender can extend its functionality. When you drag an extender and hover it over a control, if the control can support the extender, you would see the cursor turn into a plus (+) sign. If you hover an extender over the blank design surface, or over a control which is not supported by the extender, the cursor will turn into a stop sign which indicates that it can't be dropped at that position.

Another difference is, in VS 2005, an extender is shown in the design surface after being added to the page. However, at runtime, the extender is not shown at all. This makes it hard for developers to truly know how the page will look like at runtime when designing the page. In VS 2008, we have changed that behavior by completely hiding extenders in the design view. The user can recognize if a control is having an extender by checking if the control's smart tag has a little green icon shown.

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer