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New and exciting fun place to learn coding for French speaking friends...  Click here to go to Coding4Fun...

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http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/rss.aspx?Tags=Vishal+R.+Joshi&AndTags=1

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects (WDP) Releases to Web

Just some time ago I made an announcement on our team blog about release of WDP 2008... It has been a very exciting journey to reach at this point...

We had received an enormous participation for December 2007 CTP and community had provided us with a lot of interesting feedback... We had to balance out between features and timeline as usual... There are many customers who were not able to move ahead with Visual Studio 2008 installations because of unavailability of WDP 2008 and we did not hold so many folks from using VS 2008 hence releasing early was definitely important...

That said, I think the current version of WDP 2008 is a fine balance of speed to market and features... In fact I think this release has quite a few value added features:

• New Features of Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects are as below... You can read in detail about these features on the post which announced December 2007 CTP of VS 2008 WDP (Click here to go to the December 2007 CTP post)
  • Migration from WDP for VS 2005 to WDP for VS 2008
  • Replacing WDP output only if Pre-Compilation succeeds
  • Creating IIS Applications
  • Using aspnet_merge.exe version which is installed with Visual Studio 2008
• Core WDP Features
  • You can read more about this core features in the VS 2005 WDP white paper on MSDN...
  • A tutorial on Web Deployment Projects can be found at Scottgu's blog...

To find out more about the release visit the link below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/01/25/announcing-rtw-of-visual-studio-2008-web-deployment-projects-wdp.aspx

At the end I feel really proud to to call out the efforts of the heros behind WDP, my team members... Alison Lu has done a great job of testing WDP and reproducing every possible scenario that we heard from blogs, forums or connect system... Wendy Wei our dev on WDP got to the bottom of multiple issues that were raised... Bill Hiebert is our Architect and is always the support mechanism of the team... Anna Lidman is our Release Manager and makes our release process so smooth that we practically have forgotten the pains of going to the web... Tim McBride is our Dev lead and John Dundon is our test lead on WDP and have always been great partners to work with...

I hope you enjoy this release of WDP as much as we have enjoyed releasing it and hope it makes your pre-compilation and deployment challenges easier to deal with...

Happy Deploying!!

Joining Visual Studio Web Team

It has been a while since I wrote and hence it is a little strange to write... It seems like past 1.5 years of my work life has been hidden somewhere and that is kind of true as well... Hopefully I will be able to write about it in next 2-3 months, but anyways the reason for today's post is a little different...

I wanted to let you folks know that I am joining Visual Studio Web Developer team from Sept 10th 2007 (Monday) onwards... It is an exciting move for me coz I have always loved the web world and working on the team which help shapes the future of the web is super exciting to me... Hopefully in time to come I will be able to write a lot more and provide some useful info to you all...

Q. So what will I be doing in Visual Studio Web Developer team...?
A. I will be the Program Manager for Visual Studio Project System for Web... Ofcouse that is very vague right!! So let me give some more details... Visual Studio Project System for Web comprises of creation, compilation and deployment of Web based XXX from Visual Studio...
The reason I said XXX is coz XXX can include Web Site, Web Applications and any other web properties that you may want to create from Visual Studio...

Q. So what can you expect from me?
A. Well, as usual feel free to contact me whenever and however way you want... If you have any thoughts, issues, suggestions, concerns or feedback about Web Development with Visual Studio then do not think twice before writing... I promise I will conciously spend time and energy in taking the feedback in the most positive way in the most positive direction...

Q. So what kind of things can you reach out to me for?
A. Practically anything to do with Visual Studio Web Development... If it falls under the area that I am responsible for I will work on it myself, if it is beyond my area then I will send it across to the right people...

Some Random thoughts:
I feel, lot of time we take Visual Studio for granted... Many times we think that whatever is available within Visual Studio or via available add-ins is what you can do with the technology !! But Visual Studio is a product for us developers and you can say out loud the things that you love or hate about it... At Microsoft we will love to take your thoughts and suggestions and try to turn them into reality... It does not mean everything that everyone hopes will become Visual Studio feature, honestly not everything that I will hope will also become Visual Studio feature but the laundry list will be something which can become the base for discussion for the Visual Studio team... Your thoughts and suggestions will be something that will be debated and then probably the top requests will be taken up...

I am intending to talk to as many developers as possible and try to find out what features would they expect in the next version of Visual Studio that would make their life easier, their experience enjoyable and their productivity higher and higher... I will be more than willing to have a phone calls set up with you to talk about your expectations and feedbacks so if you are interested in doing so do not hesitate to let me know... If you think you would like to join the discussion along with your team then that is great too...

In anycase, to know more about the area that my team is responsible for visit our team blog below... It will provide you a lot of context on the things that we can talk about more...

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/

I will internalize our team motto and end by saying "Your websites will be my passion!!"

Looking forward to writing more often in the future...