We all want our web applications to load as fast as possible to give the best possible experience to the users. One of the steps to achieve that is to make sure the images we use are as optimized as possible. If we can reduce the file size of the images then we can significantly reduce the weight of the website. This is important for various reaso...

By Juliet Daniel, Lucas Isaza, and Uma Lakshminarayan Have you always wanted to build a blog or other web application but haven't had the time or educational resources to learn? With our blog template, available in our GitHub repo, you can create your web application fast and effortlessly, and even learn to master the new Razor Pages architecture ...

Updated 2017/1/3 - Setting to control script debugging added. See below. Visual Studio 2017 RC now supports client-side debugging of both JavaScript and TypeScript in Google Chrome. For years, it has been possible to debug both the backend .NET code and the client-side JavaScript code running in Internet Explorer at the same time. Unfortunately, th...

When building websites it is important that it is accessible for everyone that needs to use it. Implementing web accessibility features greatly helps to achieve that. Here’s what the W3C has to say about that: Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web. More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilit...

The Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem has been steadily growing in the past years and the community has built some really great extensions. Some of these extensions are specific to web development scenarios and are useful to almost all web developers using Visual Studio. The only problem is to find all these relevant extensions. That’s exactl...

In Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 we introduced a mechanism that would analyze a web project and suggest helpful Visual Studio extensions based on what it could find. For instance, if the project was using the Bootstrap CSS framework, it would suggest two very cool extensions specifically for working with Bootstrap.   It works by showing a ...

There are various kinds of tasks typically used by web developers as part of their workflow. Everything from bundling and minifying JavaScript files, to compiling LESS files into CSS and even running custom batch or PowerShell scripts. In a sense you can say that tasks are steps that needs to be performed to make the application run that are se...

Visual Studio 2015 ships with multiple open source command line tools that are used in modern web development workflows. Those tools are: All of these tools are shipped as part of Visual Studio but are not installed in the same way as you would install them manually. They are all located in the Visual Studio install directory and are used by...

We are very proud to present the first episode on our brand new Channel9 show – Web Development and Tooling TV. In this episode we talk to Scott Hunter who’s a Principal Group Program Manager on the Web Team (aka the boss). Scott introduces us to this new TV show and talks about what the team has been up to lately, as well as what’s to come in the ...

Twelve weeks ago, the Azure Applications Platform & Tools team welcomed us, three college sophomores, Jaspreet Bagga, Jeremiah Jekich, and Melissa McNeill, to Microsoft. As Explorer Interns, we were given the opportunity to experience the three primary disciplines here at Microsoft: Program Manager, Software Development Engineer, and Software ...