Im currently working on the GUI for an ASP.NET MVC application using Visual Studio 2005. The visual webpage designer (for the views) is awful.
Any input on what other people use would be most appreciated!
I'd like to advice you to create your markup by hand as everybody else does. Using designers is mostly unprofessional and leads to low quality results.
Visual Studio 2008 was a big step forward over 2005. 2005 was horrible. And Visual Studio 2010 is better yet - the quick snippets can save you a bunch of time once you get used to them.
Having installed and tested several products over the past few days, I have come to the conclusion that Microsoft Expression Studio is probably the best option when it comes to a visual design aid. Its code is clean and compliant, and although fairly basic, it allows you to create your layouts as required.
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I've been given the task of developing some extensions for Visual Studio for our internal use. These will have to support a couple of different versions of Visual Studio (VS2008, 2010 and 2012 - VS2005 would be a nice to have but not essential). I'd like to develop these in as consistent a way as possible, reusing as much of the code as possible, while fitting it into the existing project structure for these kinds of tools, which is a Visual Studio 2012 .sln.
What's the best / easiest way of developing this kind of extension? A VSPackage project? Can I make a 2008-compatible VSPackage which is developed in VS2012?
The features I will need for the extensions I'm writing at the moment are pretty basic - I need to create Tools menu commands, possibly a custom toolwindow. My requirements might change later on but I don't need editor adornments or anything like that at the moment.
I saw this question which might seem to be a duplicate, but the answer which was accepted doesn't answer the question, so...
It really depends on what is your extension going to do.
VS2008 does not support extensions (.vsix) and you will need to write VSPackage deployed as msi for it. You also won't have access to many new features introduced in VS2010 (easier editor integration and access to vs services via MEF), but basic stuff such as manipulating solution/project/files should be fine and work on all versions (e.g. using DTE should be ok).
As far as I remember for VS2008 you will also need to obtain a PLK, which is no longer required for 2010 and 2012.
I haven't tried developing 2008 package in VS2012, but you definitely can develop 2010 extension in 2012.
Also remember that VS2008 is .Net 3.5, so your code should use .net 3.5 and version of c# which it supports to be portable.
I got into a project that is under development for quite sometime and lacks models and documentation on the design. We are using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. There is one old preliminary VS architecture model and I am trying to grow it up to show how the system looks like from different perspectives.
While, I can generate the class diagrams fairly well and generate the sequence diagrams on the fly, I am stuck in generating the component diagram. I wanted to avoid the pain of generating it of my own and wished if there could be some easy process to reflect the code/implementation to a good extent. Fine-tuning is not an issue.
I expected, I could put the assemblies in the solution as components in the Model explorer. But could not. I also tried drag-and-dropping the projects to the component diagram or the namespaces/classes from the architecture explorer on to the component diagram.
Is there any easy way out?
You will need to download and install the Visual Studio SDK and the Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK then create a Domain-Specific Language Solution.
MSDN for VS 2008 DSL
MSDN for VS 2010 DSL (differs quite a bit, therefore both links)
Visual Studio Development Center - DSL
Unfortunately that is pretty much all Information I could gather, as I cannot install the VS 2010 SDK even though I do have VS 2010 Professional installed. If you happen to not be able to install it yourself here is a link to a post in the Microsoft forum of someone having the same problem atm. It is still unresolved, but was just asked a little while ago.
Edit: For creating UML component diagrams with VS2010 one will need VS2010 Ultimate. I am not quite sure weather you need it to actually install the Modeling SDK also. I dont feel a need to test it on my Professional installation though and you do have Ultimate anyway.
I'm curious what aspects you use the Expression Web for and what you prefer to do in Visual Studio.
I understand Expression Blend is for making GUI elements of WPF applications, with the programming done in Visual Studio, but how do Expression Web and Visual Studio fit together?
Expression Web is used for the UI design.
Visual Studio is used for programming the underlying model and hooking up to the UI.
They both understand XAML and can share the project/solution structure.
In fact, the were designed to inter-operate in this manner.
I prefers to use Visual Studio for most of my development needs. I briefly used Expression Web but I don't use visual design aids that much so I go back to Visual Studio & Firebug for pretty much all my web developments.
Expression Blend, on the other hand, is the go to tool if you want to do WPF & Silverlight frontend. It speeds up the UI designing process a lot.
Visual Studio is for coding!
Expression is for design!
You can easily use them together.
If you do a change in one of the the other will prompt you
for this change.
If not just refresh.
If you need to open a page through visual studio right click this page.aspx and 'open with' and find and chose expression blend.
When I've started learning Blend with VS 2010, I've used Expression Blend to make the GUI and and VS for coding. After a time I was only using Visual Studio 2010 for everything. My advice to you is to only use Visual Studio 2010 for complete development of your applications.
I want to know what is the main difference between vs2008 and vs2010..
means I want to know what is the new functionality added in vs2010.
Well, there's always Microsoft's page about the new features of VS 2010. But you can get a more distilled user perspective describing new features that specific developers really like. There are a number of blog posts about it as well.
If you plan to code a lot with threads, definitely go with 2010. It has great advancements on the profiler and debugger. The profiler especially it's awesome.
I am trying to learn some of the basic and advanced features of visual studio, Anyone find sites that have this type of information ?
I see this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/86355/best-way-to-learn-visual-studio-power-features
But it seems more related to tips and advanced features.
All three versions ( 2003, 2005, 2008 )
Microsoft has quite a few videos demonstrating various techniques in Visual Studio:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2008/bb964532.aspx
Personally I'm not a fan of training videos as I find I get impatient with them (too linear, too slow, no interaction), but maybe they'll work well for others.
STACKOVERFLOW!!!!
(Sorry, I really couldn't help myself).
You didn't mention which version. However I've read Professional Visual Studio 2005 and while I found it a little introductory for my needs, it would probably be useful for someone newer to Visual Studio though.
I notice the 2008 edition is out now too.