Search results matching tag 'VWD'

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

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:20:01 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#96: Did you know…You could publish your SQL databases using the SQL Publishing Wizard?

Anonymous — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:05:51 GMT

You can use the SQL Publishing wizard in VS 2008/VWD 2008 to deploy a local database from your development machine to a hosting environment on a remote machine.

This is how you will accomplish this:

Step 1: Create a new web site by selecting menu File ->New Web Site. Switch to Server Explorer and add a new Data connection and connect to a database. In this case we will use the Northwind database that comes with SQL Express. You should point to the database you want to publish.

Step 2: Select Northwind.dbo node in Server explorer and right click to bring up the context menu. In the Context menu you have a “Publish to provider…” option.

Step 3: Click “Publish to provider …” to launch the Database Publishing Wizard.

Step 4: Click Next to select the mode. Let us go with “Script to file” mode. We will need to specify the .SQL file name and location.

Step 5: Click Next and you will get to the Publishing Options. On this page, select the script for target database (SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005) and the types of data to publish (Schema, Data or Schema+Data). You also have the option to drop existing object in script if you want to.

Step 6: Keep the default selection and hit next and generate the .SQL script.

Step 7: The .SQL file generated contains a script that you can run on any SQL server to re-create all the tables, sprocs, views, triggers, full-text catalogs, etc. for a database, as well as import and add all of the table row data that was in the database at the time the .SQL file was created.

Step 8: The .SQL file is a plain text file. You can open it in your favorite editor and customize it as you need.

Step 9: Now that we have our .SQL files, we can go about using them to install our database at our hoster. Exactly how to install the .SQL files will vary depending on how the hoster give access to our SQL account. Some hosters provide an HTML based file-upload tool that allows you to provide a .SQL file - which they will then execute against the SQL database you own.

Other hosters provide an online query tool (like below) that allows you to copy/paste SQL statements to run against your database. If you have a hoster which provides an online query tool like this, then you can open the .SQL file with a text-editor and copy/paste the contents into the query textbox and run it.

You can find my original post here.

Reshmi Mangalore
SDET, Visual Web Developer.

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

Anonymous — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:27:39 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?

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:02:20 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?

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:36:19 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 #84: Did you know… How to set a Start page for your Web Site in Visual Web Developer?

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:49:00 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

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:32:56 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 #81: Did you know... How to use Web.Config transformation

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:58:17 GMT

With Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, we introduced a new feature called Web.Config transformation to help ease the development process of a web application. At different stages during the life cycle of a project, the user usually needs to modify some environment settings in the web.config file such as connection strings, application settings,... It can be hard to keep track of those settings and time-consuming to do so manually if the user keeps switching between development stages often. With the Web.Config transformation feature, the user can modify the web.config file seamlessly according to various server environments. Vishal has written a blog to provide detail about how to user this feature "Web Deployment: Web.Config Transformation".

Anh Phan

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #69: Did you know…The keyboard shortcut for View in Browser?

Anonymous — Sun, 31 May 2009 21:27:35 GMT

Ctrl +Shift+W does the trick for you.

This short cut is mentioned under File Menu -> View in Browser.

So if you are still using Select File -> Right click for context menu and then selecting View in Browser as shown below, you may want to start using Ctrl+Shift+W.

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer

Tip #68 Did you know… How simple it is to attach an existing style sheet to your web page?

Anonymous — Sun, 31 May 2009 21:19:01 GMT

Open an existing web site in VWD. Open the page by double clicking on it in solution explorer to which you want to attach the existing style sheet in your web site.

Now, switch to Design View of the page and bring up Select Style Sheet dialog by clicking on menu: Format –> Attach Style Sheet as shown below.

Click the OK button and this will add a link to the Style sheet that you selected in the Select Style Sheet dialog. Now you can make use of all the styles described in this style sheet.

<head runat="server">
    <title>Untitled Page</title>
    <link href="StyleSheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head></PRE< P>

Alternatively, you can just switch the page to which you want to add the link and Drag Drop the style sheet from solution explorer to the page in which you want to make use of the styles. The drag drop action adds the above piece of code to source view.

Reshmi Mangalore

SDET, Visual Web Developer