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

Tip#97: Did you know… How to Display Hidden Information in Design View

WebDevTools — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:20:01 GMT

The design view in Visual Studio can display glyphs and borders for the hidden non - graphic elements (such as div, span, form, and script elements). This feature helps you to see where the elements are and avoid inadvertently deleting the non-graphic elements from your page while editing.

To enable it in designer click on View -> Formatting Marks -> Show

Now you will start seeing the hidden elements on the designer surface.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #95: Did you know… That Web Application Projects and Class libraries are now available in Express edition?

WebDevTools — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:27:39 GMT

Creating a Web Application Project was possible only in VS standard SKU and above in VS 2008.

But with VS 2008 SP1 we went ahead and added support for WAP and class libraries in Visual Web Developer Express edition SP1. You can now create WAPs by going to File –> New Project.

Reshmi Mangalore
SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #92: Did you know … How to select a master page using 'Select a Master Page' dialog?

WebDevTools — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:02:20 GMT

Master page for a Web form can always be set manually in the source code, but here is an option to select the master page while create the webform using the 'Select a Master Page' dialog.

The path to select a Master page using the 'Select a master page' dialog is different for a Web application project than for a Web site.

For a Web Application project:

Right click solution explore. Select Add and then select New Item
From the Add new Item dialog select Web content form and click on Add button.
Select a Master Page dialog would appear. Navigate thru the project folders to select the Master page & click on OK button. The aspx added would now be using the selected master page.

For a Web site project:

While adding a Webform, check the select master page checkbox and click on the Add button.
Select a Master Page dialog would appear. Navigate thru the project folders to select the Master page & click on OK button. The aspx added would now be using the selected master page.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #90: Did you know … How to rearrange menu items in Visual Web Developer?

WebDevTools — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:36:19 GMT

You can use the Rearrange Commands dialog box to do this. To get there:

Launch the Tools->Customize dialog. Now select the Commands Tab.

Click on the Rearrange commands… button, and this will launch the dialog that will help you with arranging your menu and toolbar items. Now choose a menu or toolbar to rearrange. You can rearrange the items by selecting them and moving them up and down. You can also use this dialog to add your own menu options.

Rearrange Commands Dialog:

Reshmi Mangalore,

SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #89: Did you know…You could customize Toolbars in Visual Web Developer?

WebDevTools — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:53:02 GMT

Visual Web Developer by default shows the standard toolbar. To expose the remaining tool bars, you will have to right click on the standard tool bar area. This will bring up the list of all toolbars available. Select in this list to show or hide toolbars. In the picture below, I have chosen the formatting toolbar and the HTML Source Editing toolbars to be shown.

You can further customize the tool bar using the Tools->Customize menu option. This will launch the Customize dialog box.This dialog gives you the option to Use large Icons, Show Screen Tips on Toolbars and Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips.

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer.

Tip #88: Did you know… To not stress your server, limit the number of concurrent requests

WebDevTools — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:07:43 GMT

The other day somebody ask me if there was a way to limit the amount of work that Site Analysis in IIS SEO Toolkit would cause to the server. This is interesting for a couple of reasons,

You might want to reduce the load that Site Analysis cause to your server at any given time
You might have a Denial-of-service detection system such as our Dynamic IP Restrictions IIS module that will start failing requests based on number of requests in a certain amount of time
Or If you like me have to go through a Proxy and it has a configured limit of number of requests per minute you are allowed to issue

In Beta 1 we do not support the Crawl-delay directive in the Robots exclusion protocol; in future versions we will look at adding support this setting. The good news is that in Beta 1 we do have a configurable setting that can help you achieve this goals called Maximum Number of Concurrent Requests that you can configure.

To set it:

Go to the Site Analysis Reports page
Select the option "Edit Feature Settings..." as show in the next image
In the "Edit Feature Settings" dialog you will see the Maximum Number of Concurrent Requests option that you can set to any value from 1 to 16. The default value is 8 which means at any given time we will issue 8 requests to the server.

Carlos Aguilar Mares, IIS Team

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Technorati Tags: IIS,SEO,tips and tricks

Tip #87: Did you know… How to reuse a web page by converting into an ASP.NET User Control?

WebDevTools — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:10:03 GMT

If you want to reuse a web form's content in other places in your application, you can easily convert the page into an ASP.NET User Control. Then you can add that user control to any other page.

For example, you have a page in your application that looks like the following:

Now, you need to rename to the file to have a .ascx extension. Then remove html, head, body, form tags from the page. Change the "@ Page" directive to a "@ Control" directive. Remove all attributes of the "@ Control" directive, except Language, AutoEventWireup, CodeFile, and Inherits. You also need the change the Inherits to have your new UserControl code behind file's name, like in the image below. Close and re-open the file to make squiggles go away.

If you have a code-behind file, its name will be changed properly for you automatically. Open the file and change the class it inherits from to UserControl, and the class name to match your .ascx file. See below.

More information can be found here.

Tip#85: Did you know… You can now do Multiple Selection of controls in your Designer with VS 2008 SP1?

WebDevTools — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:15:45 GMT

Visual Web developer 2008 SP1 supports multiple selection of controls on your designer using Ctrl+Click.

You can see that the designer:

Displays the primary selected control with a white tab. Button3 in the image below.
Enable you to set property for the selected controls using Property Grid. Note that the property grid would show you only the properties that are in common for all the selected controls.
Enables you to make use of the Align, Make Same Size and Order Menu commands in your Format Menu options.

However VWD 2008 SP1 does not support the ability to drag drop multiple controls and Cut/Copy/Paste of multiple elements.

Thanks!

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #84: Did you know… How to set a Start page for your Web Site in Visual Web Developer?

WebDevTools — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:49:00 GMT

As you are developing your site, you may want to start at a particular page for testing your web site. By defaults, when you start debugging, Visual Studio runs the page that was currently in focus in your designer.

If you set this page, Visual web Developer will start your web site with the Set Page and not the current page in designer.

You can do this by right-click on the page and selecting Set As Start Page option from the context menu.

This could also be set in Properties page under the Start Options tab as shown below.

Enjoy!

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #82: Did you know... How to migrate Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Project to Visual Studio 2008

WebDevTools — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:32:56 GMT

Following steps highlight how a Visual Studio 2005 Web application project can be migrated to Visual Studio 2008.

Take backup of the original project
Open Visual Studio 2008
Click File -> Open Project and browse to the folder to open the project
You will receive the following conversion wizard to help you convert the solution or project to the current version. Click Next.
Select Yes on this screen if you want the wizard to help you to take the backup, otherwise select No and Click Next.
Be sure to read the summary on this screen & click finish
As soon as you click finish, you will see an upgrade prompt. Click yes if you want to upgrade to the latest framework otherwise Click No. If you select yes to upgrade, the project file as well as web.config file is updated for the latest framework. It's recommended to select the checkbox to do the same for all webs in this solution.
The conversion wizard would show you the status, select Show the log to see the log and click close.

For projects using Ajax you might need to install ASP.NET Ajax Extensions 1.0 in VS 2008 if you said no to upgrade. Please see Tip #62 to learn how to install it.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #75: Did you know…How to maintain scrollposition after post back?

WebDevTools — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:43:04 GMT

When web pages are posted back to the server, by default user is returned to the top of the page. On a large web page, you might have a requirement to scroll down the user automatically to the last position on the page.

MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack page property can be used to achieve this in one of the following ways.

Application level: To set the property by default for all pages in the website, open web.config and add the attribute to the pages node.

<pages maintainScrollPositionOnPostBack="true">
Page Level: for a particular page, open the aspx and set the property

<%@ Page MaintainScrollPositionOnPostback="true" ...
Code level: to set the property programmatically

Page.MaintainScrollPositionOnPostBack = true;

Hope this helps.

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip#63: Did you know…How to specify a fixed port for Visual Studio Development Server while using WAPs?

WebDevTools — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:59:18 GMT

In Tip#21 we showed you how to set a fixed port for the Developer Web Server in Web Sites.

Here is how you will be able to configure this for Web Application Projects.

1. Go to the properties page of WAP. Right Click on your Web Application and click on Properties in context menu. This will take you to the Properties page.

2. Select Web Tab in this page.

3. Under Servers section, select the Use Visual Studio Development Server option. Then select Specific Port and enter the port on which you want your App to run.

4. View your page in browser and you will see that Visual studio has assigned the port you configured for your Development Server.

Enjoy!

Reshmi Mangalore

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 #49 Did you know… how to set the editor to always place open braces on new line for functions in JScript?

WebDevTools — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:24:01 GMT

In Visual Studio, click Tools -> Options. In the Options dialog on the left pane select Text editor -> JScript -> Formatting.

Check Place open brace on new line for functions.

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer

Tip #45: Did you know…How to change the DynamicData folder location?

WebDevTools — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:29:05 GMT

ASP.NET Dynamic Data is a framework that lets you create data-driven ASP.NET Web applications easily. It does this by automatically discovering data-model metadata at run time and deriving UI behavior from it.

By default for a Dynamic data Web Application the dynamic data folder is created in the root folder. Your application might require it to be moved to a different location.

Following are the steps to achieve this in VS 2008 SP1.

Choose which folder your want it to be moved to. For example, lets move it to admin folder. Create admin folder and move DynamicData folder under it.
In Global.asax add the following

model.DynamicDataFolderVirtualPath = "~/admin/DynamicData";
Change the content of files under admin/Dynamicdata you moved in step1 to reflect the new path location (~/admin/Dynamicdata).

For example,
- change the register directive src attribute in List.aspx and ListDetails.aspx
- img src in List.aspx and master page
- any other content which you might have customized and has to use the new path location

Deepak Verma
SDET | Visual Web Developer