Web Development Improvements with VS 2010

There are many more features shipped with Visual studio 2010 which helps you to develope web application. I was just going through some of the features that provided by VS2010 as well as ASP 4.0.

ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC was introduced as an add-on framework to ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 in March 2009. Visual Studio 2010 includes ASP.NET MVC 2, which includes new features and capabilities.This let you group controllers and views into sections of a large application in relative isolation from other sections. Each area can be implemented as a separate ASP.NET MVC project that can then be referenced by the main application. This helps manage complexity when you build a large application and makes it easier for multiple teams to work together on a single application.

This will be a very small piece of ice berg. Well, I am going to have a separate thread on ASP.NET MVC.

IntelliSense Enhancements - JavaScript

VS 2010 has come up with rich developer experience in JavaScript writing. They have included intelligence to recognize objects that have been dynamically generated by methods such as register Namespace and by similar techniques used by other JavaScript frameworks. They also addressed the performance of display IntelliSense with little or no processing delay. Documentation comments are now parsed as you type and are immediately leveraged by IntelliSense.

HTML and JavaScript Snippets

In the HTML editor, IntelliSense auto-completes tag names. The IntelliSense Snippets feature auto-completes entire tags and more. Visual Studio 2010 includes over 200 snippets that help you auto-complete common ASP.NET and HTML tags, including required attributes (such as runat="server") and common attributes specific to a tag (such as ID, Text etc).It is also support download of additional snippets, including you can write your own snippets that encapsulate the blocks of markup that you or your team use for common tasks.

CSS Improvements

One of the major areas of work in 2010 has been to help render HTML that is compliant with the latest HTML standards. This includes changes to how ASP.NET Web server controls use CSS styles.

New Project Templates

In earlier version of ASP.NET when we create a web application it creates only minimal files.Ex: Web.Config, app_data ,Default.aspx etc. With VS 2010 they have shipped new project templates that contain major changes. The following figure shows the project layout that is created when you create a new Web Application project. (The layout for a Web Site project is virtually identical.)

The project includes a number of files that were not created in earlier versions. In addition, the new Web Application project is configured with basic membership functionality, which lets you quickly get started in securing access to the new application. The intention of these changes to the project templates is to provide guidance on how to start building a new Web application. With semantically correct. , the pages in the templates represent best practices for building ASP.NET 4 Web applications. The default pages also have a two-column layout that you can easily customize.We can then go into the Site.css file and modify CSS class definitions to change the background color of the page as well as that of the header, as in the following example.

Web.config File Refactoring

The web.config file has grown big over the past release of web frame work as to include new features. With Asp.NET 4 as VS 2010 , the major configuration elements have been moved to the machine.config file, and applications now inherit these settings. This allows the Web.config file in ASP.NET 4 applications either to be empty.

jQuery Included with Web Forms and MVC

The Visual Studio templates for both Web Forms and MVC include the open-source jQuery library.

Enabling View State for Individual Controls

By default, view state is enabled for the page, with the result that each control on the page potentially stores view state even if it is not required for the application.In earlier versions of ASP.NET, developers could disable view state for individual controls in order to reduce page size, but had to do so explicitly for individual controls. In ASP.NET 4, Web server controls include a ViewStateMode property that lets you disable view state by default and then enable it only for the controls that require it in the page.

ASP.NET Chart Conrol

The ASP.NET Chart control expands the data-visualization offerings in the .NET Framework. Using the Chart control, you can easily create ASP.NET pages that have intuitive and visually compelling charts for complex statistical or financial analysis.

Well , I know that blog is not going to cover all features that shipped with VS 2010 as well as ASP 4.0.I am planning spent some time and take up one by one features and come up with detailed code samples for each.