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Please update to the latest version of Web Essentials 2012 after installing VS2012 Update 2
After releasing ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2, which is also included in Visual Studio 2012 update 2, we’ve received a few customer feedback about their VS shows an error dialog saying: An exception has been encountered. This may be caused by an extension. You can get more information by examining the file 'C:Users<username>AppDataRoamingMicrosoftVisualStudio12.0ActivityLog.xml'. When looking at ActivityLog.xml, the following error message may show up: System.ComponentModel.Composition.ImportCardinalityMismatchException: Duplicate EditorFormatDefinition exports with identical name attributes exi...
Seeking Feedback on Alternative Formats for ASP.NET MVC and Deployment Content Maps
The ASP.NET content maps are lists of resources that we have reviewed and recommend. The content maps have been popular in their present form, but we’re looking at ways to improve them, such as by publishing more lists but with a narrower focus to each one, by providing more information for each link, and by formatting them differently. Here are links to the existing content maps and three pages that show new approaches we’re considering: We’re calling the new lists “curated views.” Curated in the sense that, although anyo...
A quick note about the new MinClientVersion attribute
In the NuGet 2.5 release, we added the MinClientVersion property to the package manifest schema to allow for a package to demand the minimum version of the NuGet client that can install it. Because this feature was added in version 2.5, older versions of NuGet won't be able to recognize it. Therefore, older clients will always refuse to install packages with the MinClientVersion property set, even if you set it to a value smaller than the version of the client. For example, if you set MinClientVersion to 1.8, and the user tries to install your package with NuGet 2.2, the installation will fail even though 1.8 &...
Support for Native Projects
In the NuGet 2.5 release notes, we called out that NuGet now has support for native projects. We wanted to explain exactly what "support for native projects" means. Visual Studio Support Until NuGet 2.5, if you were working in a Visual C++ project, the 'Manage NuGet Packages' context menu would not show up for the project; with NuGet 2.5, we now light this up. Any time we start supporting a new project type, we have to test to ensure all operations are working as expected. Each project system has slightly different behavior and this proved to be true with Visual C++ as well. We made the changes necessary to get...
NuGet 2.5 Released
Download it now NuGet was included in all editions of Visual Studio 2012 and it's also available for Visual Studio 2010 through the Visual Studio Extension Manager. To get the latest version of NuGet installed in Visual Studio, either check for updates in the extension manager or download the latest version directly. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the following external contributors for their significant contributions to NuGet 2.5: We also appreciate the following individuals for finding bugs with NuGet 2.5 Beta/RC that were approved and fixed before the final release: What's Inclu...
Social Engineering
When people in our industry use the term “social engineering” they are usually referring to security attacks. Politicians and lobbyists would mean something entirely different too. But that’s not what I will talk about here. Instead, I’ll talk about the kind of social life we’ve around in our team. Why am I using the term engineering then? Because I strongly believe that building a great team is a conscious effort. Wikipedia defines the term engineering as follows: Engineering is the application of scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design, build, and ...
XDT (XML Document Transform) released on codeplex.com
In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a simple and straight forward method of transforming web.config during publishing/packaging. This support is called XML Document Transform, aka XDT. It allows you to transform any XML file, not just web.config. To learn more about XDT check out the docs. Since we've released XDT there has been interest in re-using the transformation engine in other scenarios. To enable some of those scenarios we released XDT on NuGet. After that we started working on integrating XDT into NuGet and asked for some feedback from the community. In order to cover all the scenarios for NuGet users ...
XDT web.config transforms
Sitting there since October 12, 2010, with a total of 55 votes accumulated since then, there's a NuGet feature that has had more than its fair share of attention: Support Visual Studio (XDT) Web.config Transforms. It's the 17th highest voted work item of all time for NuGet, and the 5th highest voted open work item. Today, we are announcing that we are finally unblocked on getting this feature integrated into NuGet! Last November, we made the decision to act on this feature request, and Luan Nguyen (dotnetjunky) posted a discussion thread that NuGet would be taking a dependency on the XDT assembly. Within a few h...
Goodbye preview.nuget.org. Hello staging.nuget.org!
TL;DR The preview.nuget.org site is going away. Switch to staging.nuget.org by April 26th! Goodbye preview.nuget.org We have a version of the NuGet Gallery called "Preview" and it's been hosted at preview.nuget.org since early in the Gallery's lifetime. Until recently, our QA team used preview.nuget.org to do their testing, but we've also occasionally advised package owners to use the site as a sandbox environment. Over time, this has put us in the situation of the "preview" site serving two different purposes: 1) it was an internal QA testing environment, and 2) it was a customer sandbox/preview environment. ...