New Features for Web Development in Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available to download. Please visit Jason Zander’s Blog for the download links and overview of the new features.

We have many enhanced many features in the Beta. We’ll discuss some of them in future blog posts.

Here are a few web development tools features included in the Visual Studio 11 Beta compared to VS2010. Many of them have already been mentioned in our Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview blogs.

Visual Studio 11 Express Beta for Web is now available. It includes support for TFS and unit testing tools. It’s downloadable via Web PI.
ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and ASP.NET MVC 3 are included in the Visual Studio 11 Beta
New MVC 4 templates and Web Forms templates are provided with features such as HTML5 support and ASP.NET 4.5 bundling and minification.
Page Inspector allows you to see what elements in the source files (including server-side code) have produced the HTML markup that is rendered to the browser. Page Inspector also lets you modify CSS properties and DOM element attributes and see the changes reflected immediately in the browser.
The JavaScript editor is rewritten and is now based on IE10’s JavaScript engine. Many new features are added to support JavaScript as a first class citizen programming language, such as Go to Definition, outlining, brace matching, etc. In Beta, we enhanced reference settings, extensibility, performance and reliability.
New CSS editor functionalities include a new formatter, validator, snippets, color picker, comment support, hierarchical indentation, and vendor specific IntelliSense. In Beta, we enhanced the color picker and made CSS editor features friendlier.
New HTML editor functionalities include source view smart tasks, better auto indentation, live updating of matching open/close tags, server side event handler generation, Extract to User Control and more.
IIS Express is now the default website and web application host instead of ASP.NET Development Server (i.e. Cassini). With Visual Studio 11 Beta Ultimate, you can also use profiling with IIS Express.
SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB is the default database for Visual Studio 11. LocalDB is created specifically for developers. It is very easy to install and requires no management, yet it offers the same T-SQL language, programming surface and client-side providers as the regular SQL Server Express. In effect the developers that target SQL Server no longer have to install and manage a full instance of SQL Server Express on their laptops and other development machines.
Publishing for Web Application Projects (WAP) has been updated. Publishing profiles are now designed for team scenarios and are stored into a separate folder, allowing proper version control and usage from MSBuild/Team Build. You can configure your WAP to be precompiled/merged before publishing on the Package/Publish Web tab under the Project Properties.
Project System enhancements include having a list of common and most recently used items in the Solution Explorer add menu, and the ability to set the browser for viewing and debugging via toolbar.
Web projects Round trip support with Visual Studio 2010 sp1. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh266747(v=VS.110).aspx for detailed information.