Fix-It: Nesting between .aspx and code behind is lost when you move files to a different folder

In this post I am hoping to cover a quick tip/trick about file nesting in ASP.NET Web Site Project.

Let’s say you have the below web site in your solution explorer:

If you move “About.aspx” and “About.aspx.cs”  to the “New Folder” shown above then you will see the file nesting in solution explorer incorrect…

To fix this issue there is a solution explorer button for “Nesting Related Files” as shown below…

When you click this button the project system should update the solution explorer and show you the nested files correctly…

-Vishal

Technorati Tags: Web Site,Visual Studio

Fix-It: Multiple instances of Visual Studio Development server getting created

Sometimes while developing some of you might notice a lot instances of Visual Studio Development Server (aka Cassini) in your system tray… Many of these icons when clicked on land up just vanishing away and at times these icons may flood the system tray causing frustration…  Sorry for that :-(

One of the reasons for this happening is that ASP.NET Development server is set up to use dynamic port allocation as shown below:

WAP (Right Click Project –> Properties –> Web)

Web Sites (Select Web Sites –> F4 to see properties)

Sometimes on some developer boxes either Windows firewall or custom firewall blocks a bunch of ports… In this situation Web Development Server tries to hook to one of the blocked ports port and is not allowed to… In the process the Development Server lands up crashing… Next time it tries to assign itself to another dynamic port and the same thing happens…  As a result there are various tray icons created even though the Web Development Server exe has actually crashed…  That is the reason when you hover over the icons in the system tray they vanish away…

Firstly, let me call out that this is a bug, I just verified it with our key dev Bill Hiebert and he confirmed that this is now fixed in VS 2010…  For the time being the work around for

VS 2008 developers is to go ahead and turn off the Auto-assign Port/Use Dynamic ports option and actually set a fixed port which you know is not blocked by one of your firewalls…  Hopefully with this the multiple icons in the system tray should no longer appear…

If you still face problem then do write back…

-Vishal

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET Development Server,Visual Studio Development Server,Cassini,Visual Studio

Multiple instances of Visual Studio Development server getting created

Sometimes while developing some of you might notice a lot instances of Visual Studio Development Server (aka Cassini) in your system tray… Many of these icons when clicked on land up just vanishing away and at times these icons may flood the system tray causing frustration…  Sorry for that :-(

One of the reasons for this happening is that ASP.NET Development server is set up to use dynamic port allocation as shown below:

WAP (Right Click Project –> Properties –> Web)

Web Sites (Select Web Sites –> F4 to see properties)

Sometimes on some developer boxes either Windows firewall or custom firewall blocks a bunch of ports… In this situation Web Development Server tries to hook to one of the blocked ports port and is not allowed to… In the process the Development Server lands up crashing… Next time it tries to assign itself to another dynamic port and the same thing happens…  As a result there are various tray icons created even though the Web Development Server exe has actually crashed…  That is the reason when you hover over the icons in the system tray they vanish away…

Firstly, let me call out that this is a bug, I just verified it with our key dev Bill Hiebert and he confirmed that this is now fixed in VS 2010…  For the time being the work around for VS 2008 developers is to go ahead and turn off the Auto-assign Port/Use Dynamic ports option and actually set a fixed port which you know is not blocked by one of your firewalls…  Hopefully with this the multiple icons in the system tray should no longer appear…

If you still face problem then do write back…

-Vishal

Web Application Project Vs Web Site

Few days back I summarized the difference between a project system and a project templates; today I want to focus on key differences between different project systems available for web developers in Visual Studio…

You might be aware of the fact that we have two different types of project systems for Web developers i.e Web Application Projects (WAPs) and Web Site Projects (WSPs)…  Often time I get asked this question on which type of project should to use for web development…  Sometimes web developers even start a religious war on the two choices, honestly here you have an option to choose the god of your own choice and this post is my attempt to help you make an informed decision…

Most of the time I land up asking questions to people before actually recommending a particular project system.  I will try to keep the format of this post in that similar fashion as it typically works out easier to come to a conclusion…  If you are in a hurry and do not care of about the inner workings then feel free to just read the questions (in bold) and the highlighted winning project system name in the answer :-)

Q1. Do you intend to deploy source code on your production server and edit it right on the server if there was a time sensitive bug reported ?

If you answered Yes to the above question, you want to use Web Site projects (WSPs)…  In case of Web Site projects Visual Studio does not really compile your source code on your dev box, it merely uses aspnet_compiler to validate that your source code will actually compile and run on the server…  Hence when you try to deploy a web site people typically also deploy the source code on the server which allows them to edit the source right on the production server if there was a time sensitive bug reported…

Q2. Conversely, are you sensitive about not having your source code openly available on production servers?

If you answered Yes then you want to use Web Application Projects (WAPs)… In case of WAPs the .aspx.cs or .aspx.vb files are actually compiled via VS and converted into a .dll which actually resides in the BIN folder of your project…  The generated dll is named as MyProject.dll by default (but you can change the name and also potentially strong name sign it if you care)… Hence in case of WAP projects you do not need to deploy you .aspx.cs or .aspx.vb files which prevents exposure of your source code, in case of WSP you need to deploy these files… The subtlety to note here is that Visual Studio in this case is actually calling C# or VB compilers to compile your .aspx.cs or .aspx.vb files whereas in case of Web Sites the ASP.NET RUNTIME compiler calls the C# and VB compilers internally on production servers...

Q3. Do you care to unit test your source code which is present in your .aspx.vb/.aspx.cs files?

I know this is a politically flaming question, don’t answer it aloud :-)… If you answered Yes then you want to use WAPs… As WAPs generate a DLL out of your .aspx.cs and .aspx.vb files you can very easily create a Unit Test project using MBUnit, NUnit, VS Unit Test etc and add a reference to the WAP DLL…  In case of WSPs there is no DLL generated on developer box hence it is difficult to reference that code and write unit tests for them…  Not that it is not doable but it is not very intuitive and easy as in case of WAPs…

Also additionally if you have factored your C#/VB source code in a class library and are unit testing that library then WSP projects will work just fine…

Q4. Do you want many developers editing the deployed site as and when required by going to the server ?

If you answered Yes then refer to Q1. the rationale is simple WAP does not give you an option to edit .aspx.cs or .aspx.vb files on the server directly hence you need to use WSP in this case…

Q5. Do you use Source Code Control like VSS or Team Foundation Server to store your sources ?

This question was just for fun and clarity… :-) It does not matter whether you are using WAP or WSP… There is full source code control integration available with both project types so this is not really a deciding factor…   Similarly debug, run, view in browser etc all work no matter which project system you choose…

Q6. Do you intend to use Team Build/Cruise Control.NET etc to create a nightly/rolling builds or set up Continuous Integration?

If you answered Yes then ideally you are better off with WAP…  WAP is actually a MSBuild based project system and as you may be aware MSBuild is the basis of most command line build/test/deploy model for projects created by Visual Studio...  It contains .csproj or .vbproj file which contains all the MSBuild semantics to be able to build/compile/deploy your web project, hence it is very easy to set up command line builds, deployments etc with WAPs.  WSPs on the other hand have no .csproj or .vbproj files, we provided rudimentary support for WSP to use command line build using Solution Files (.sln)…  It is not rocket science to have WSP projects build in Team Build/CC.NET but the fact is that when WSPs were designed back in VS 2005 continuous integration (CI) was not the primary scenario rather quick easy editing of web pages was a higher priority… 

A different way of thinking about this is that there can be a lot of generic MSBuild based plug-ins (tasks/targets) which can out of the box work for WAPs but will need your own manual tweaking around to get them to work with WSP…  Essentially this decision point is not as black n white but without doubt WAPs will be way easier when it comes to MSBuild/Team Build support…

Q.7 Do you intend to remotely connect to your web and edit it via FTP?

Many people create their web sites and deploy it to a remote server… Eventually, they want to be able to connect to these LIVE sites from Visual Studio and edit them live by adding more features to them, fixing bugs etc…  If you are one of these folks then WSP is a better bet for you as WSP allow you to open a Web Site on the server and edit it right inside of Visual Studio… Again it boils down to the fact that the server actually has your source code so it is possible to edit it via FTP or FPSE and as WAPs do not have source code it does not really make sense to try to edit them…

While we are on this topic, let me mention  “please try to avoid using FPSE, it is a deprecated technology on the server side and sooner or later Visual Studio will stop supporting it”…

Q.8 Is there a possibility that you might ever loose your source code from your dev box if your hard disk crashed and you never had source code control back up?

Sounds like a silly question right, but many times for my personal web sites I do land up in this bucket… Recently I lost the source code for a portion of KritZu project, well it was a windows app but the point is that for my tiny home grown projects I sometimes do not have a proper source control repository…

Anyways in this scenario if you had a WSP and had deployed it with source code on the server then you might be better off… But then honestly this is a silly reason, please create back up of your source code somewhere and don’t use this as a differentiating factor…  Additionally in VS 2010 you can also create source package of your project and potentially save them somewhere, it makes creating back ups for source code in WAPs much easier, so in case of VS 2010 you can also use WAP equally well for this scenario…

Q.9 Do you intend to update just few .aspx and .aspx.cs/.aspx.vb files and do not want to recompile your project?

If you answered Yes you want to use WSP… Again as described in Q.1, 2, and 4 above Web Site project has source code on the server and it gets compiled there so if you just want to update one file and push it on the server then you do not need to recompile your project.  This is the very reason why “Copy Web Site” feature is available only with WSP and not with WAP… In case of WAP as all the .aspx.vb/.aspx.cs files are actually compiled into a DLL if you want to just change one of it you have to recompile….

NOTE:  If you just want to change .aspx files and not .aspx.vb/.aspx.cs then WAP is equally good… 

Q.10 Do you intend to leverage Web Deployment features of VS 2010 and MsDeploy?

If you answered Yes then you want to use WAPs…  There are tons of Web Deployment features available in VS 2010 for WAPs, some of them are:

• Overview of Web Deployment with VS 2010 and IIS
• Web Packaging: Creating a Web Package using VS 2010
• Web Packaging: Creating web packages using MSBuild
• Installing Web Packages using Command Line
• 10 + 20 Reasons why should you create Web Packages
• Web.config Transformation
• DB Deployment with Visual Studio 2010
• Web 1-Click Publish

Not that the above features will be supported in Web Site someday but we initially implemented the entire feature set on MSBuild so that it can be supported in a CI model on CC.NET/Team Build and as it is very straightforward to hook MSBuild WAPs was the de-facto choice… WSPs do not have a project file and hence trying to implement this for WSP will require a major changes in WSPs which we are not able to accommodate within VS 2010 box…

Q.11 Have you heard of Web Deployment Projects for VS 2005 and VS 2008?

Web Deployment Projects (WDP) are an add on to VS 2005 (Download WDP 2005)and VS 2008 (Download WDP 2008)… WDP is a MSBuild based project and it has its own project file… It essentially takes the output of WAP or WSP and pre-compiles/merges it into DLLs which are ready to be deployed… Essentially WDP does the compilation that ASP.NET Compiler would do at RUNTIME and so if you use them during build time then your web pages’ FIRST TIME load performance will significantly improve (as ASP.NET will not have to compile the pages on the server)…

For WSP this means that you get some of MSBuild benefits of integration with Team Build/CC.NET but then you loose the flexibility of having your source code on the server and editing it anytime you want…  In any case WDP in my opinion should NOT be one of the deciding points while choosing WAP or WSP, in fact  WDP works just fine with both the project systems… 

Many people try to use WDP to get Team Build style benefits on WSPs but then I would recommend pausing and asking yourself a question “Why are you using WSP if you are about to loose many of the advantages of WSP like being able to edit code files anytime, etc?

So from WDP standpoint either WAP or WSP is equally ok…

Q.12. Do you write inline C# or VB code in .aspx files (in addition to / instead of writing it in .aspx.cs or .aspx.vb)?

People sometimes do write <script runat=”server”> int i;</script> or <%= %> style code inside the .aspx pages… If you do so you should note that WSP provide better intellisense and refactoring here… But most of the times the difference is not very noticeable in WAPs either (at least not many people are screaming about  it :-))…  So if you leave that part alone both WAP or WSP work the same from this standpoint…

The code written in .aspx pages EVEN IN CASE OF WAP does not get compiled by VS… The code in .aspx pages is left as is and is compiled by ASP.NET compiler on the server… So essentially even if you are using WAPs you can also edit the code written in .aspx on the production server… Certainly, you can do this with WSP too…

So when it comes to writing inline C# & VB code WSP and WAPs are more or less the same…

Q.13 Do you aspire to write both VB and C# code in a single Web Project?

What if people who love VB could write VB code and people who love C# could write C# code and they both can work on the same project at the same time… Interesting idea right…?  You can imagine that in some community project people may decide to do this… In enterprises or formal companies I have never seen this happen due to maintainability reasons…  Anyways, even for kicks if you want to write both VB and C# code in the same Web Project it is way more simpler to do so in WSP than in WAP… 

Again it is not impossible to do it in WAPs but slightly more convoluted…  The reason why it is complicated to do this in WAP is coz WAP compiles everything based on the project file which is either vbproj or csproj… WSP on the other hand is just a folder and ASP.NET RUNTIME can call any compiler based on the file extension… There are some ifs and buts and maybe someday I will write about them but for now WSP is more preferred in this scenario…

Q.14 Have you heard of ASP.NET MVC projects?

In  my Project template vs. Project system post I had mentioned that ASP.NET MVC Projects are a type of WAP…  To further explain it MVC Projects are essentially what we call as “Flavor” of WAP…  Flavor is a special little “lingo” of VS :-) think of it as a special type of inheritance i.e. MVC Projects flavor WAP Projects who in turn flavor Class Library projects and all along the line you keep getting more an more features while the child projects can hide features of the parent as well…  For e.g. MVC projects hide “View in Browser” command while adding “Add a View” command…We can talk more about this some other time but in nutshell MVC projects have got controllers and model classes which all get compiled into DLLs and the Views get deployed as they are on to the server…

MVC projects also are pro on Unit Testing so in lines with Q3. we just decided to avoid any confusion and just created MVC projects for WAPs… So if you are using ASP.NET MVC you are most likely using WAPs… Again using ASP.NET MVC with WSP is possible, it is just not straightforward option and some IDE features may not be available out of the box if you were using MVC with WSP today…

Q.15 Do you want to edit your code while debugging (w/o stopping debugging)?

Edit & Continue feature is supported only in WAP projects and not WSP hence if you care about Edit & Continue then WAP is your option of choice…

In conclusion, there are more subtle things to look out for… e.g. Few days back I explained why App_Code does not work all that well with WAPs…  But other things should be hopefully minor issues and the above decision points should hopefully allow you to make an informed decision when WAP vs WS discussion comes up again…:-)

There are more subtle differences between WAP and WSPs and some of them are discussed in the white paper on MSDN…

Hope this discussion helps and do not hesitate to reach out if you would like to know anything in more details…

-Vishal

VS Project Template Vs Project System

You might many times hear the words “project templates” and “project system” from time to time, I though it would be worth while to talk about the differences between the  two from a web developer stand point…

Web developers using Visual Studio use either File –> New –> Project or File –> New –> Web site as shown below to create new Web projects as shown below:

The new project dialog for Web Developers looks as below:

and the new web site dialog looks as below:

What is probably interesting to note is that all the options that you see inside any of these dialog boxes above are just “Project Templates” and what that really means is that they are underlying the same project system but just wrapped with different set of start up files for easy project development…

In reality there are only two major Project Systems for Web Developers

1. Web Application Projects (WAPs) which are accessible via File –> New –> Project –> Web
2. Web Site Projects (WSPs) which are accessible via File –> New –> Web Site

What is also interesting to note is that WAPs and WSPs have different code bases (with reasonable set of shared components)… I will eventually write a post on real differences between WAPs and WSPs but today let us focus on Project Systems vs Templates…

A Project system like WAP or WSP actually takes care of building, compiling, debugging, managing source control, deploying, hooking up references, intellisense etc etc  for a project…  In essence the major code for functionality of the web project like commands, hot keys, content menus, toolbars etc are all specific to a project system and they remain the same across all the project templates of a single project system…

A Project template on the other hand is simply a bunch of files bundled together to allow a person to easily start developing a certain type of project…   The project templates can have specific files like .svc or .aspx with boiler plate code in it… Each project template can choose to include its own set of references or code files… Behind the scene the project system invoked to do all the magic remains the same… For example ASP.NET Web Application and WCF Service Application are just two different templates for “Web Application Project System”…  Similarly there are a bunch of project templates for “Web Site Project System”…

The key Project templates for Web Application Projects (WAP) are:

• ASP.NET Web Application
• Empty ASP.NET Web Application
• ASP.NET Web Service Application
• WCF Service Application
• Dynamic Data Linq to SQL Web Application
• ASP.NET MVC Web Application (MVC is a customized Web Application Project system, we call it Flavor of WAP, so it is not necessarily a project template only…)
• Dynamic Data Entities Web Application

Similarly, the key Project templates for Web Site Project (WSP) are:

• ASP.NET Web Site
• Empty Web Site
• WCF Service
• ASP.NET Reports Web Site
• Dynamic Data Linq to SQL Web Site
• Dynamic Data Entities Web Site

Hence many a times there are features which work for one project system but do not work for other… A classic example is App_Code directory which works great with Web Site projects but not as seamlessly with Web Application Projects…  Recently I wrote a blog post on Why App_Code does not work as well with WAPs…

Anyways, I hope this gives an idea on how the project systems and project templates for Web Developers work within Visual Studio…

-Vishal

Did you know: How to get “Unload Project” option to show

Typically if you want to edit your .csproj or .vbproj file manually then there is a very easy way to do this within VS:

First: Unload the project within VS

Second: On the unloaded project click “Edit project.csproj/vbproj”

Now you can edit the file and click “Reload Project”…

Although at times you might not see the “Unload Project” menu and  it is interesting to note that this menu shows only when your solution is showing up… The solution shows up when you have more than one project but if you have only one project in your solution then solution file does not show by default…  If you want to have the solution file show in the solution explorer then you can go down to Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > General and check “Always show solution”…

After this your “Unload Project” menu should start showing up on your project file.

-Vishal

Replacing your old DB with new one using VS 2010

Earlier in the below blog posts we had talked about how to Deploy your DB using VS 2010…

• DB Deployment with VS 2010
• Exclude App_Data during your deployment

Today I wanted to share how you can replace your old DB with a new one using VS 2010 DB Deployment.

Before we get into it please note that using this method you are essentially going to get rid of your old DB schema as well as data and replace it with the new one…  You should make sure that you do not turn this setting on accidentally as there will be no way to revert it back if you accidentally drop your DB content… !!

So with that understanding and with the assumption that you have already, configured your DB for deployment for use with Web Packaging OR 1-Click Publish; let us proceed:

After configuring your DB for Deployment your “Deploy SQL” Property tab should look something like below:

If you look at the above UI, you will notice that there is no UI option to drop your database objects during Packaging or Publishing… This was an intentional decision as we did not want anyone to accidentally check that box and regret later… Although you can do this by manually by editing your project file…

To do that you will have to Right Click on your project and click “Unload Project” as shown below:

Once you unload your project you will have an option to Edit your project file as shown below:

Alternatively you can also open your project folder and edit the project file in notepad…

If you have your DB deployment configured in “Deploy SQL” tab (shown above) of your project properties then you should find following XML schema in the project file:

<PublishDatabaseSettings>
      <Objects>
        <ObjectGroup Name="MyDB" Order="1" Enabled="False">
          <Destination Path="" />
          <Object Type="dbFullSql">
            <PreSource Path="your connectionString value" ScriptDropsFirst=”True” ScriptSchema="True" ScriptData="False" SchemaQualify="False" CopyAllFullTextCatalogs="False" />
            <Source Path="obj\Debug\AutoScripts\MyDB_SchemaOnly.sql" />
          </Object>
        </ObjectGroup>
      </Objects>
</PublishDatabaseSettings>

If you notice carefully you should see that in the “PreSource” node above I have

additionally inserted a special attribute called ScriptDropsFirst=”True”, this attribute will tell the Web Publishing Pipeline (WPP) to insert DROP statements while scripting your DB…

In nutshell the PreSource node tells VS 2010 about your source DB and the options you would like to use while script it… ScriptDropsFirst is only one of the options but there are several others properties that you can set to control the scripting of your DB which are mentioned in SMO Scripting Options.

The option of ScriptDropsFirst will not drop your Database it will simply drop the objects inside the Database… If you would also like to drop the Database and recreate it you should use the option dropDestinationDatabase=”True”. If you are deploying to a hoster like DiscountASP or OrcsWeb you should NOT use dropDestinationDatabase option as most likely you will not have the permission to do so and even if you did the chances are that you will not have an option to recreate it and you might have to land up calling the support center…  Hopefully if you are deploying to a hosted server then you will not need to drop the DB and just dropping the schema and data inside it will be sufficient…

Anyways, once you have set these attributes  on your preSource node you can now save the project file and reload it… After that next time you Package or Publish your deployment will first drop all the tables, columns and data in your destination DB and then recreate it using the newly generated SQL script…

-Vishal

App_Code folder doesn’t work with Web Application Projects (WAPs)

As you might already know we have two different project types for web development  in Visual Studio 1.) Web Application Projects (WAPs) 2.) Web Site Projects (WSPs)…

Often time developers hear that if you want to put a random class file in your web project you should put it in App_Code folder.  While this is true for Web Site Projects (WSPs), it is not so much true for Web Application Projects (WAPs) and in this post I will try to explain the inner workings on why that is the case…

Firstly App_Code folder is a special ASP.NET RUNTIME folder…  Any files in this folder are compiled by ASP.NET when your site is actually running on the server...  This essentially allows you to drop random class/code files in this folder to be compiled on the server side…  For this very reason if you drop something new into the App_Code folder of your running web site, it is like resetting it coz ASP.NET runtime now recognizes that there is a new class which needs to be kept in consideration during running the site…  This magical folder brings with itself various connotations when it comes to different project types…

First of all it is important to know that Visual Studio does not really create any DLLs when you are using Web Site Projects (even when you are building the web site)…  VS simply validates that your code is correct in WSP… In Web Application Projects (WAPs) this is not actually true as VS actually creates a DLL with all the code behind and class files that are present in your project and drops them into the BIN folder of your project…

In case of WAPs every file in the project is marked with a specific “Build Action” as shown below:

All the class files (.vb/.cs) are marked as “Compile”… This essentially tells VS to take all those files and call the correct VB/C# compilers on them…  The result of that activity is the DLL,which is named same as your project name i.e. WebApplication1.dll, being created in the BIN folder of your project…

With this understanding let us look at right click Add—> Add ASP.NET Folder --> options on Web Application Project

You will notice that App_Code folder is not really available as an option… This is an intentional behavior… 

If you add a App_Code folder into a Web Application Project and add classes to that folder then more than likely their “Build Action” will be marked as “Compile” (as all .vb/.cs files are defaulted to “Compile”)… This will signal Visual Studio to compile them inside the IDE to produce the DLL in the BIN folder…  For illustration let us assume you added a class called Products in App_Code\Products.cs file which is marked as “Compile”… Now when you build your WAP you will get a DLL in your project BIN (e.g. WebApplication1.dll), which when you open in ILDASM or Reflector will tell you that Product class exists in it…

Now when you try to run the project locally or do a xCopy deployment of your WAP to the server you will might accidentally move the App_Code\Products.cs on the server as well…  This is time when things start getting tricky… Now you have a DLL in the BIN which is provided as a reference to ASP.NET runtime which has the Products class… Also ASP.NET is trying to compile your App_Code folder (as it is a special Runtime folder and that is an expected behavior) which will result in duplicate declaration of your Product class (one in the referenced project DLL and second in the dynamic compilation)…  As you can imagine duplicate declaration of same type is not desirable…:-)

Additionally, VS will auto generate namespace for your Products class in the DLL to be something like WebApplication1.App_Code.Products vs ASP.NET runtime will produce a hashed version of the name space causing additional connotations giving you weird error messages…

So at a high level there are many reasons why App_Code folder is not supported for Web Application Projects and should be avoided…

Does this mean App_Code and WAPs just don’t ever work together?

No, that is not true… App_Code and WAPs can work together, you need to make sure that “Build Action” of none of the files in the App_Code folder is marked as “Compile”… Ideally you should mark them as “Content” which will ensure that they will get deployed on the destination and get compiled by ASP.NET instead of locally by VS IDE… 

But this will bring its own side effects that intellisense may not work very well for these files inside VS as they will not be treated as Class files by VS… But the key point is that you do not really need “App_Code in Web Application Projects (WAP) if you do not intend to put random code files or modify existing code files in App_Code folder directly on your production server…

What should one do if there are isolated code files which need to be added to WAPs?

You can add code files under any folder call it “CodeFolder”, “Controllers” or anything that makes sense in your project… Just avoid putting them under “App_Code” unless you specifically want the server side compilation behavior…

-Vishal

Exclude App_Data Folder from Deployment

SQL Server Express is a development time database and it is not recommended to use it on your production server.  The rationale for providing SQL Express edition was to ensure that development can be done without having to install a licensed copy of SQL Server on your development machine…

Additionally most of the hosters do not support SQL Server Express on their shared web servers and enterprises are typically running on full SQL Server in their Staging/Production environment.

When you are developing a Web Project using Visual Studio then your SQL Express MDF file is put inside App_Data folder.  VS also ensures that App_Data folder is set up with the correct read/write access so that your application can then write to the Database files in it… 

When it comes time to deploy your application you should ensure that your MDF files do not get deployed with the rest of your application.  To help with this VS provides option to exclude the content of App_Data folder.

Web Application Projects (VS 2005/ VS 2008)

If you are using Web Application Projects in VS 2005/VS 2008 then when your right click on your project and hit “Publish” then the option to Exclude the content of App_Data is available as a checkbox as shown below:

Web Application Projects (VS 2010)

In VS 2010 web deployment is hugely improved… As part of the clean up this option is now moved to project properties as shown below:

When project properties window opens then navigate to Package/Publish tab… In this tab there is a checkbox which allows you to exclude “App_Data” content while publishing…Check the box as shown below:

With this setting Visual Studio 2010 will make sure that your Web Deployment does not includes content of App_Data folder… If you would like to learn more, check out the rest of the properties of Package/Publish tab…

After setting this property it will get respected automatically while creating a web package or while using 1-Click Publish…

Are there scenarios to not exclude App_Data folder all the time?

Sometimes I have been asked why to give a specific option to Exclude App_Data folder and not exclude it all the time by default.

Well people also put bunch of other files in App_Data folder for e.g. XML files which your web updates or other flat file DBs that your web might potentially use…  In this scenario excluding App_Data would exclude those files too and you would ideally want to avoid that, hence there is an explicit option to leave out the content of App_Data folder…

Hope this helps!!

-Vishal

Web Deployment Projects do not work after installing VS 2008 SDK

Some days back it was brought to our attention that Web Deployment Projects (WDP) stop working after installing Visual Studio 2008 SDK…  As you soon VS 2008 SDK is uninstalled then WDP again start working…

We narrowed down this issue to be due to “Isolated Shell Application” which come as part of VS 2008 SDK…  The work around to get WDP working again is to go ahead remove the Shell package by deleting the registry key below:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages\{815946b0-1c0d-4eab-8226-36ea3c59162a}

If you would at anytime restore the Shell package functionality then it would be advisable to Export the registry key and save it somewhere (or repairing the VS 2008 SDK install should also do the same)…

If you have any concerns or issues please do not hesitate to write back to Vishal.Joshi@Microsoft.com

-Vishal

PS: Do note that although the WDP build reports failure with VS 2008 SDK installed the build is not really failing, it is just a reporting false failures, so it is not as severe as it sounds….

10 + 20 Reasons why you should Create a Web Package

Before we talk about the reasons why you should create a Web Package let us first understand what is a web package… Web Package is an atomic, transparent, self describing unit representing your web application which can be easily hydrated into any IIS Web server to reproduce your web…  It is a .zip file which not only contains your content but also contains its dependencies like IIS Settings, Databases, GAC DLLs, Registry Keys etc…

The concept of creating Web Packages for deploying your web application to an IIS Web Server is recently introduced with Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (MsDeploy) and towards the end of this post I will talk about how you can create a Web Package for your web app… But before going there let me talk about the 10 reasons why you should consider creating web packages for your web application:

1. Having all your web content and dependencies like IIS Settings & DB into a single .zip file allows you to easily transport it anywhere…
2. If the web package actually contains source code then you can replicate your dev environment to another box relatively easily…  Imagine being able to recreate a project on your home machine by simply emailing yourself a .zip file…
3. If you are deploying in a web farm environment then deploying the web package to various server boxes will allow you to very easily recreate your load balanced web servers…
4. If you are creating software for community to use then sharing web package .zip files with world creates a common handshake model…
5. Web Application Gallery, which will be common home to find reusable Web Applications also uses the same Web Package format… So you will have an opportunity to put up your web app into Web Application Gallery if you create a Web Package…
6. Most of the Package creation process is very automated so you do not need to write custom actions like you would have to do in case of MSIs…
7. Creation of Web Packages can be automated along with your nightly builds really easily using MsBuild with systems like Team Build…
8. You can create a web package for various versions of your web application and easily use the versioned packages to roll back to any version you like…
9. You get free standardized UI to install the Web Packages in IIS Manager which hopefully will become pretty standard and easy for everyone to understand…  If you do not like to use the UI the package can be installed via commandline as well…:-)
10. Most of the automated tools (providers) required for packaging  your web application and its dependencies are available out of the box (few of which are IIS Settings, SQL DBs, Web Content, GAC assemblies, COM components, Registry keys etc)… 

Finally let me mention the out of the box providers which can be invoked when you want to package your web application…  You actually have a choice to call any of these providers depending on what parts of your Web Application you like to be packaged… These are my other +20 reasons why you should create a web package…

1. File System Directory to move a files & folder which contains your web application files like .aspx, .config, images, .js, .css, .master etc – contentPath
2. Creating a new IIS Web Application for your web– iisApp
3. Moving IIS7 and above (read Vista, Win2k8, Win7, Win2k8 R2 and above) Configuration Settings associated with your web (e.g. Default Document, ApplicationPool Mapping etc) – appHostConfig
4. IIS5.1 & 6 (read XP, Win2K3 compatibility)  Metabase Configuration Settings (parallel to IIS7+ settings above) - metakey
5. Pulling data & schema from existing SQL Server Database or custom generated .SQL files which your web uses– dbfullSQL
6. Any Security Certificates (e.g. SSL & ClientAuth) that your web depends upon- cert
7. Any GACed assemblies like 3rd party controls or libraries that your web uses – gacAssembly
8. Any custom IIS7+ Application Pool that your web has created– appPoolConfig
9. Registry key associated with your webs – regkey
10. 32 bit COM Object – comObject32
11. 64 bit COM Object – comObject64
12. Security ACLs associated with folder – setAcl
13. Granular control by pulling just a registry value - regValue
14. ASP.NET root web configuration file on 32 bit machine – rootWebConfig32
15. ASP.NET root web configuration file on 64 bit machine – rootWebConfig64
16. Similar type of support for packaging MySQL DB – dbMySQL
17. Packaging Machine.Config of 32 bit machine – machineConfig32
18. Packaging Machine.Config of 64 bit machine – machineConfig64
19. If there is still a provider missing then you can very easily create one – yourCustomProvider
20. A secret provider which I am not allowed to talk about just yet :-), but trust me it is really a killer provider - secretProvider

So now that you have 10 +20 reasons to create a web package let us talk about how to create one… From end developer/IT pro standpoint you can create Web Packages from various different avenues, some of which are:

• Web Packaging from VS 2010 UI 
• Web Packaging from MsBuild in VS 2010
• Web Packaging from CommandLine
• Web Packaging from PowerShell
• Web Packaging from IIS Manager

Please follow the links above to create a web package using your preferred method… I hope you are jazzed about being able to archive and deploy your web applications using Web Packaging…

Importing a Web Package into IIS Manager

Today I am hoping to talk about installing/importing a Web Package into IIS using IIS Manager…

For this walkthrough you will first need a Web Package… If you want to get few ready made packages you can get them from Web Application Gallery…  There is also a MsDeploy package of BlogEngine.NET available on CodePlex, which you can download to try out this walkthrough…

Hopefully, eventually you will be creating your own web packages for deployment and this walkthrough will even apply at that time…  If you want to learn how to create a web package from Visual Studio 2010 then read the below posts:

• How to create a web package from VS 2010
• How to create a web package using MsBuild commandline
• How to include SQL DBs within your web packages 

To begin importing a web package into IIS using the new “Import Application” wizard you need to make sure that you have installed IIS Manager by going to Add/Remove Windows component…  You will also need MsDeploy installed over IIS, typically it will come with your VS 2010 installation but if you do not have VS 2010 just yet then you can download it from MsDeploy Download.

Today, I will install a Web Package of the sample ASP.NET 4.0 web application that I created earlier in the tutorial “Creating a simple ASP.NET 4.0 Web Site”…

To start importing the web package let us start IIS Manager (Start –> Run –> InetMgr)

I will be installing the web package under Default Web Site…  Although it is not required to install the package under Default Web Site, it can be installed under any Web Site of your choice… Also if the package created was a “IIS Web Site Package” then it could be installed under the server /sites node directly as well…  In anycase when we open the “Default Web Site” node then on the right side command bar you will now notice two new commands  1.) Export Application 2.) Import Application as shown below:

On clicking “Import Application” on the first screen you will be asked to provide the path to web package (.zip file)… I will be providing the location of the sample web package which I created in the earlier tutorial:

On clicking next the Import Application wizard will display the content of the web package as below:

Notice that in the above example the package wizard shows that the Web Package contains:

1. IIS 7 Application - This will actually do the job of creating an IIS Application and mapping the virtual directory…  It will also move any additional IIS Settings associated with the web application…
2. File System Content  - All the physical files (.aspx, .dlls etc) which need to be placed in the web site directory…
3. Database – This is the database that I packaged into my web package

On clicking “Next” I will get a screen which I will call as the “Parameters” screen…  When you create a package using VS 2010, then VS identifies the key attributes of your web application which you need to customize and it creates MsDeploy parameters for the same…  All these parameters are something which you can modify during the package import process as seen below…
In the above example notice that “Default Web Site” is read-only… This is due to the fact that the “Import Application” wizard was invoked from Default Web Site… I am now naming the Web As “SimpleASP4Web” and placing it under “C:\WebSites\SimpleASP4Web”…  Also note that I am using “SimpleASP4Web” DB on my local SQL Server…

The ConnectionString that I am providing in here will be used to deploy my packaged DB and will also be used to update my web.config file (this will happen only if the package was created to do so…  I will write a separate blog post on how to do that, but in future release of VS 2010 this option will be set by default when you create the web package at the first place…)

In any case now on clicking “Next” the Web Application installation will begin showing you a progress bar and hopefully within no time the web package will get installed showing you the status as below:

On hitting “Finish” on this screen the web package will be installed and on inspecting the IIS Manager you can see that the package is actually successfully imported and web site is ready to go:

On inspecting the SQL Server Management Studio you can also see the Simple ASP4Web DB also installed:

Hopefully you can see that the web deployment features with great UI options in VS 2010 and IIS will make the process of packaging and installing you web applications much easier than what it has been before…

-Vishal

Unload Web Site and WAP in Visual Studio

Inside Visual Studio many times people want to be able to unload a projects without having to completely close them…

Web Application Projects (WAPs)/ Class Libraries Unload

WAPs or Class Libraries unloading the project allows you to open the .csproj or .vbproj within an XML editor and modify the properties… This is by far the biggest reason why unloading WAPs, Class Libraries etc is used…  You can Unload most of the VS projects by Right Clicking on the project node and clicking “Unload Project” as shown below:

After Unloading the project looks as below and you can again Right Click on it to edit the project file.

Web Site Project Unload

Web site project on the other hand are different, firstly cause they do not have a project file and hence unloading them to edit the project file is not a motivation…  People still do want the ability to unload Web Site project and the scenario around it is that when you unload a project then on Solution build the unload project does not get built… This way if you are in middle of writing some code in that project and have existing errors then you can still unload it and continue with solution build…  Also Reloading the project will be faster than opening a closed project…  With that said if you Right Click on Web Site project you won’t find the “Unload Project” option… 

The right Click context menu is already very long for Web Site and as Unloading Web Site is not as common the command for “Unload Web Site” actually sits in the “Web Site” menu on top of Visual Studio as shown below:

After unloading the project you can then right click on the unavailable node (just like WAP above) and ask VS to “Reload Project”…

Also FYI unloading and reloading of project resets a lot of in memory objects associated with the project so in VS 2010 we explicitly load and unload WAP as well Web Site when you change your project’s target .NET framework version (e.g. move from 3.5 to 4.0)… This allows VS to hook in the correct intelligence, toolbox etc etc associated with the correct .NET Framework version…

Hope this small tip & trick  will help you…!!

Disabling Script Debugging with VS 2010, Silverlight & IE 8

This is a quick post to cover few items related to Script Debugging and the way it is impacted by Silverlight, Internet Explorer 8 and Visual Studio 2010…

With IE 8 there is no longer option to disable script debugging… When VS 2010 will launch IE 8 then script debugging will be enabled by default… This will help people debug scripts flawlessly without having to go and change script debugging features within IE 8… While this is a good feature for most users it might at times create problem when you do not really want script debugging to be enabled for performance reasons (i.e. if you do not want to debug scripts and have lot of scripts in your pages)…

On separate note Silverlight is a special debugging option for Web Projects…  You can view that by going to Project –> Properties –> Web…  Check the screenshots below for Web Application Projects (WAP):

for Web Sites you can view those options by going to Web Site—> Properties –> Start Options as shown in the figure below

Now Silverlight debugging is mutually exclusive with Script Debugging as Debugger at a time can attach to only one of the two, so when you turn on Silverlight debugging then VS has to turn Script Debugging Off…  If you have bunch of Client side scripts in your Silverlight project which needs to be debugged then in that case you will have to go to the above option and turn off Silverlight debugging to have Script Debugging enabled… 

Now a side effect of all this is that if you want to turn off Script Debugging on your regular projects then your easiest work around is to go and turn on Silverlight debugging and your script debugging will get turned off by itself…

GreggM on our Debugger team has got some further detailed work around via modifying the registry at http://blogs.msdn.com/greggm/archive/2009/04/06/disabling-script-debugging-in-vs-2008-ie8.aspx, it is a great post take a look at it…

Hope this workaround helps you!!…

Web Development with Windows Azure

Today I am hoping to put together a bunch of resources to get started on Web Development on Windows Azure…

Overview & Value Props

At a very high level Windows Azure will provide cloud computing platform for web developers with few key advantages over any other on premise or hosted environment… IMO, the key value props of Windows Azure for Web Developers are:

• Scale up and down based on your need – You can start off with very small server capacity and eventually as your web site traffic grows you can choose to request more capacity as things go…
• Failover management – If one of the server fails or your application goes down then Windows Azure will take care of spinning up new server VMs for you behind the scenes without your site experiencing any downtime…
• Store your Data in the Cloud -  If your web application is sitting in the cloud then you will need to have your database in the cloud as well...  With Microsoft’s cloud storage you can now have your data in the cloud as well…
• Use existing  Skill Set – Developers have invested a lot of time and energy in learning technologies like ASP.NET and general .NET framework in itself.  In Windows Azure you will be able to use the same APIs that you are familiar with…  Funny but you can also host PHP applications on Windows Azure…

If you would like to learn more about the high level advantage and direction then visit Windows Azure for Web Developers page… While you are at it make sure you watch the small videos on the page which will give you a good back ground about Azure for Web Developers…

Getting the Windows Azure Tools & Accounts

Next, let us talk about what do you get yourself set up for Azure development…

• Register for a free Windows Azure Account – The chances are that the account may not remain free and available all the time so go ahead and register for a account at Connect site
• Use your existing Visual Studio 2008 install or even better than that download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1  which is available to download for FREE…
• Recently Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio were released which work on VS 2008 as well as VS 2010 Beta 1… Download the Windows Azure Tools for VS and install them on top of VS 2010 Beta 1…
• You can also separately get the Windows Azure SDK, although I would recommend using the Tools install which contains all the stuff that you need including the runtime… 

Do find some very useful resources around the Azure application development below:

Useful Documentation

• Windows Azure Resource Index
• Windows Azure home page on MSDN
• Windows Azure SDK Samples
• Windows Azure Downloads
• Windows Azure Training Kit

Web Casts & Videos

There are some good Azure web casts available… View Windows Azure Web Casts

Some of the interesting videos in the series of Windows Azure Videos are:

• How Do I: Get Started Developing with Windows Azure?
• How Do I: Debug Windows Azure Applications
• How Do I: Store Data in Windows Azure Tables
• How Do I: Use Logging in a Windows Azure Application?
• How Do I: Get Started with .NET Services

MSDN has got some more Azure Videos too…

Microsoft Events site also has many other Windows Azure videos…

Sample Projects

To get started further easily you can find sample projects which use Windows Azure at www.codeplex.com… TIP: Search for “Azure” in CodePlex and you should find some samples easily…

Feedback and Questions

If you have any feedback and Questions, you can certainly leave them here; additionally you can also go to Azure User Groups….   

Hope this helps…

- Vishal | Twitter: @VishalRJoshi

SharePoint Designer 2007 download for Free

SharePoint designer was made as a free download for everyone starting April 2009… You can download it for free from:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=baa3ad86-bfc1-4bd4-9812-d9e710d44f42#RelatedLinks

You can learn more on the SPD page @ http://www.microsoft.com/spd

Tom Rizzo from SharePoint team shares some of his thoughts on the SPD Designer decisions….

Hope this will remove one more barrier for folks to learn and get ahead with SharePoint…

How to make Content Web Pages to use existing Master Page

Let us say you want to add a new page Page1.aspx to use Site.Master…  Lets say that Site.Master already exists in your project…

If you were to add Page1.aspx as a simple .aspx page then you will have to make manual change to the <%@ Page directive of the page to make sure Inherits property is set correctly… But generally you will not need to do this if you add the file in the below fashion…

WEB SITE PROJECTS: If you are using a Web Site Project (i.e. below)

Then in that case you can Right click on your project –> Add New Item and “Select Master Page”

On the next page you will get an option to select the master page as shown below:

WEB APPLICATION PROJECTS (WAPs):   If  you are using a WAP (i.e. File –> New Project as shown below)

Then while adding a new page, right click on your project—> Add –> New Item and instead of selecting “Web Form” select “Web Content Form” as shown below:

When you now click the “Add” button you will get to select the Site.Master page that you had previously added to your project… Check the figure below…

Hope this helps…

- Vishal | Twitter: @VishalRJoshi |

ASP.NET 4 Beta1 & MsDeploy RC1 Hosting for FREE

FREE is the word of the day…  Check out what all you can get for free:

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 is available for FREE at http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx
• SQL Server 2008 Express edition is always available for FREE with VS 2010…
• MsDeploy is available for FREE with VS 2010, but additionally you can download it for FREE also from http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1602
• ASP.NET 4 is always FREE
• Combine all of the above and imagine you could get FREE web hosting space for IIS 7 & ASP.NET 4.0 + FREE web hosted SQL Server 2008 databases…

Sounds interesting right!!… This is exactly what I just announced on our Team Blog…

Get ASP.NET 4 Beta1, VS 2010 Beta1 & MsDeploy RC1 hosting free!!

Although, before finishing off I need to pause and thank OrcsWeb and DiscountASP teams who have been hard at work since weeks now to get you FREE hosting accounts to try out the new technologies way before even “GO LIVE” license for them is available…

I personally want to thank

Takeshi, Frank, Aristotle and their team @ DiscountASP.NET

AND

Scott & WebTeam @ OrcsWeb

for all their hard work over last so many days, including weekends… As you can imagine setting up remote hosted accounts on brand new technologies while we are still making changes to them is not a simple task…  Just to give you a glimpse it takes from provisioning servers, setting up .NET 4.o, SQL Server, IIS, MsDeploy and dependencies, setting up security + provisioning all the individual accounts that you request, configuring automated emails with correct connection strings, auto generated + unique user ids, site names + passwords etc etc…  Then working for several days to make sure that automatic provisioning yeilds correct emails and correct security settings so that your webs work seamlessly…  This is in all honestly a lot of work and hats off to these folks to make all that work…

Gladly enough you do not need to do all that hardwork to try out all these things… All you need to do is below 3 things…

1. Download VS 2010 Beta 1 for FREE from Microsoft download center
2. Get a free hosting account from Get ASP.NET 4 Beta1, VS 2010 Beta1 & MsDeploy RC1 hosting free!!
3. Follow the walkthrough Web 1-Click Publish with VS 2010

Do provide your feedback in comments here, or on Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 and ASP.NET 4 Beta1 Forum…  Also you can follow #1ClickPublish on twitter…

Hope you will enjoy the offer… 
-Vishal

Known Issues, Resolutions and Work-arounds for VS 10 Web 1-Click Publish

There are certain known issues and workarounds which you may or may not encounter while using VS 2010 Web 1-Click Publish but I have still posted them here in case you face any of those and want to debug your deployment problems…

• If you receive 502- Bad Gateway error then go to Internet Explorer –> Connections –> LAN Settings –> and uncheck the “Automatically detect proxy settings” and after that you should be good to go…
• At times within Intranet environments if ISA Server or alike is not running then you may get errors like “VsMsdeploy failed.(Request to remote agent URL 'https://myWebServerName:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=myWebSite’ failed.) Error Details:Unable to connect to the remote server. OR The remote name could not be resolved… “   The resolution for the above issue is to enable the ISA server and re-run you deployment…
• If you get an error about your .mdf file being used by some other process then the resolution for this issue is to right click on your MDF file under App_Data folder and click “Detach”…  The other typical culprit which holds an handle to the .mdf file is the Server Explorer… You can try to close the server explorer and try publishing again too… Finally, I hate to say it but if nothing works then you can restart VS…  This is a known bug and will be resolved in the future releases of Visual Studio 2010…!!