.NET Blog
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Improvements in .NET Framework Setup for Developers, IT Pros, and Users
The only experience most Microsoft customers have with the .NET Framework is the deployment and installation experience, which is why we spend so much time analyzing opportunities to improve it. For .NET 4.5, our goal was to build a product that was equivalent to a service pack with additional features. Our team studied how other products with similar update goals managed to improve their deployment then we took those best practices and applied them to the .NET Framework 4.5. This is an area where we heavily rely on telemetry data to prioritize areas of improvement, a practice that has led to noticeable change...
BlogEngine.NET and Windows Azure Web Sites
The Windows Azure Web Sites team has been hard at work looking at various applications and working with vendors and community contributors to add some great applications to the web sites gallery. If you’re a blogger and you’d like to get started for free with a simple, yet extensible blogging tool, you might want to check this out. Starting this week you can install BlogEngine.NET into a free instance of a Windows Azure Web Site. I’ll walk you through the process in this post. The Gallery Windows Azure Web Sites makes it easy to get started with a new web site, and you can’t beat the price and the ability ...
Improving Your App’s Performance with PerfView
Late last year, Vance Morrison, who is currently an architect on the .NET Framework Performance team, released PerfView, which is a new performance tool for .NET developers. PerfView helps you discover and investigate performance hotspots in .NET Framework apps, and enables you to deliver consistently high-performance apps to your customers. Using PerfView, you can perform complex CPU performance analyses to solve hard-to-detect performance problems. PerfView's revolutionary grouping and folding features are what makes it possible to grasp and solve these difficult problems. PerfView can be used for any app on...
How do I cancel non-cancelable async operations?
This is a question I hear relatively frequently: “I have an async operation that’s not cancelable. How do I cancel it?” The construction of the question often makes me chuckle, but I understand and appreciate what’s really being asked. The developer typically isn’t asking how to cancel the operation itself (if they are asking that, the answer is simple: it’s not cancelable!), but rather they’re asking how to allow their program’s execution to continue upon a cancellation request even if the operation being waited on hasn’t completed yet. T...
Spell Checker extension for Visual Studio 2012 HTML, ASP.NET, CSS and other files
I have updated spell checker extension for Visual Studio 2012. You can download it from Visual Studio Gallery. Spell checker supports text verification in: Spell checking is supported in style and script blocks as well as in JS, CS, VB, CSS, CPP and H files. Spell checker is able to detects lang attribute specified on HTML elements, extract ISO language and use it to specify appropriate dictionary for the Office spell checking engine. Requirements Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 any edition except Express. Microsoft Word 2003, 2007 or 2010. Extension was not tested with Office 15 preview. ...
More Details on the “Closing Tag Problem”
We are testing a fix for the “closing tag problem” bug, but it will still take some time to deliver the fix to customers. The work-around posted earlier will alleviate the problem now and should not need to be undone once the fix is shipped.This bug has actually been in the product for several release, but was previously hidden by another bug. When you begin typing an HTML tag, an Intellisense completion list is displayed. The earlier bug was that this list blocked keystrokes bound to commands from firing. An obscure command, “AutoCloseTagOverride” was bound to the key combination Ctr...
Workaround for HTML closing tag problem
In Visual Studio 2012, HTML tags will fail to be automatically closed when using the following keyboard layouts: On these keyboards, the “>” character is typed by pressing AltGr+. or RightAlt+.Work around Typing an HTML tag will now result in the closing tag being automatically inserted, as in VS 2010.
WCF Duplex Bi-directional Streaming with WebSocket Transport
DuplexBiDirectionalStreaming VS2012 project DuplexBiDirectionalStreaming.zip Introduction With WebSocket transport, it’s possible to use streamed transport on the Duplex Callback – something that was previously a technical limitation with WCF but is now possible using this transport. New to .Net4.5 is the NetHttpBinding (and NetHttpsBinding), which is a new standard binding that leverages the WebSocket transport if it makes sense to do so. You can configure it to always use WebSocket transport, but by default, it will only use it for Duplex channel shapes. Why? Well, what this transport gives you is the ability...
Invoking NuGet Services from inside Visual Studio
One of the best kept secrets of the NuGet extension is that besides the UI that everyone has become familiar with, it also exports some useful services, via MEF, which allow other components in VS to interact with NuGet. These include installing packages, uninstalling packages and querying for installed packages. Over the past year, the NuGet team has received many inquiries from various teams inside and outside Microsoft asking us how to perform such tasks from their components. We have solidified the guidance over time and wanted to share it broadly. As of the current version (2.0), NuGet exports six interfac...