General ASP.NET

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  1. Take my site/app offline during publishing

    Currently when I publish my site/app it stay's online. It would be better to drop an app_offline.htm during publishing so that my app doesn't behave in a funky fashion.

    615 votes
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      16 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
    • 365 votes
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        9 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
      • Provide a more helpful message for viewstate exceptions

        If you've ever received the following message, you know it takes FOREVER to track down the source:

        Failed to load viewstate. The control tree into which viewstate is being loaded must match the control tree that was used to save viewstate during the previous request. For example, when adding controls dynamically, the controls added during a post-back must match the type and position of the controls added during the initial request.

        I would like to propose that the exception message include the UniqueID of the control that failed to restore ViewState so the problem spot in the control tree can…

        2 votes
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          0 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
        • Report Viewer Helper for MVC

          Please add a Report Viewer Control for MVC. Web Forms has one. Will not be able to completely move off of Web Forms until one is created.

          19 votes
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            5 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
          • Integrated ftp uploader for website files.

            In most case scenarios I'm uploading my website files using ftp and publishing tool is very uncomfortable.Meanwhile not all hosting companies are giving full access to their servers.
            I remember in VS2005 there was an extension named Dispatch. It was very comfortable, right click, upload and file is on deployment server.
            I think this can really save a lot of development time.

            148 votes
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              2 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

              Hi Michael, if I understand you correctly you want a way to easily publish a small set of files to the destination. We’ve heard similar feedback previously and I appreciate you creating this item here. I have placed an entry on our backlog for this so that we can consider it for a future version.

            • Make WebDeploy transactional

              When deploying a site, the previous version should continue to run. If the deployment fails, the site should continue to run on the previous version. If it succeeds, the switch should happen after publication is complete.

              225 votes
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                under review  ·  2 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
              • Able to store session data both in inproc and out of process, similar to mixed mode session support.

                It will be great if we can store session data both in inproc and out of process by an application similar to mixed mode session support. So that only crutial session data will be persisted out of process and some non crutial or temp ( depending on situation ) can be stored in InProc.

                This support will be utilized by non web farm or web garden architecture.

                6 votes
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                  under review  ·  0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                • Add the ability to transform Web.Config without rebuilding

                  Allow Web.Config transforms to be applied to a deployment package without a rebuild under a different configuration.
                  QA packages can then be converted to production release packages without fear of introducing any subsequent changes.
                  Add ins exist but would prefer to have built in support

                  16 votes
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                    3 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →

                    Thanks for the suggestion. If I understand you correctly you want to be able to create a single Web Deploy package and then use that to publish to multiple destinations, including executing the web.config transform?

                    We are certainly looking at this scenario. I have created a prototype of what this support might look like. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. I’ve created a 5 minute video. You can take a look at http://sedodream.com/2012/03/14/PackageWebUpdatedAndVideoBelow.aspx.

                  • Show me the parts of my .config files that I can delete

                    As projects grow and transition from greenfield to brownfield projects .config files are getting more and more obsolete and dead stuff in them.

                    Do help me and show me what I delete of this.

                    72 votes
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                      under review  ·  2 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                    • Minify scripts served by the ScriptManager

                      Bundling is a cool idea, but it doesn't always play nicely with the ScriptManager when used in a webforms scenario. I would like to propose the ability to set a flag on the ScriptManager that would allow it to minify the combined scripts its serving.

                      1 vote
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                        under review  ·  1 comment  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                      • Add ability to encrypt connections strings (and other web.config sections) upon deployment of a web application to a web server (using publi

                        I hate the fact that after publishing an asp.net web app, I need to remote into the server and encrypt connection strings and perhaps other sections of my web.config. It would be great if I could automatically kick off a post-deployment script which would do this for me.

                        13 votes
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                          under review  ·  1 comment  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                        • Add better support for ConfigurationManager's ability to modify web.config

                          WebConfigurationManager (and ConfigurationManager) throw exceptions when trying to load a web.config in anything less than High Trust environments. The sole reason for this being that the local web.config is merged all the way down from the machine-level web.configs, via any parent applications in IIS.

                          Better idea: put all inherited configs into a read-only dictionary at runtime (rather than putting the ConfigurationManager settings into a dictionary, which is what actually happens, therefore preventing writing back of a .config file to disk after modifying a setting). When the web.config is loaded at runtime, take the inherited settings dictionaries, apply them to the…

                          4 votes
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                            under review  ·  0 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                          • Make intellisense track included JavaScript ressources via @Url.Content("...") etc.

                            Including a ressource using the following works. So Intellisense is available for the included ressource.

                            <script type="text/javascript" scr="/path/to/file.js"></script>

                            But as always, paths are note absolute. So asp.net mvc offers Url.Content("...") to dynamically generate the correct path to the requested file no matter where the application is placed in the web folder hierarchy.

                            So it would be very nice if you could make Intellisense also track paths specified in @Url.Content("") so that it is available for includes JS classes/functions.

                            5 votes
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                              1 comment  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                            • Add a contextual menu option to navigate to the related *.ascx file

                              If you're using *.ascx controls that you've created in your pages, it would be nice to be have a one click way to navigate to its definition instead of noting its name and looking for it in your solution explorer (especially for large projects).

                              There are other enhancements that would be nice such as automatically adding the @Register tag if the control is located in the current project.

                              4 votes
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                                under review  ·  0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                              • Support for Stylus

                                Add please native support for Stylus - much better than Less and SASS/SCSS CSS preprocessor.

                                1 vote
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                                  under review  ·  0 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                • Better error handling

                                  When trying to handle errors in ASP.NET, you have to jump through a series of unintuitive and often poorly documented hoops to catch an exception and handle it in a sensible way. The non-senisble and default way to handle exceptions would be to redirect to a static HTML file that responds with an HTTP 200 Status Code, which is so wrong it's crazy that it's even available as an option, nonetheless set as the default.

                                  It's also extremely confusing that IIS and ASP.NET each tries to handle errors on their own way, with their own corresponding, diverging and confusing configuration…

                                  26 votes
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                                    under review  ·  2 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                  • Make enrypting the connection strings easier to do during deployment

                                    right now you have to run aspnet_regiis to encrypt the connection strings in a web.config. It would be nice to this could be built in as a part of the deploy process.

                                    38 votes
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                                      0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                    • Real time change in UI or javascript code

                                      I would really like to have real time update on UI and javascript etc etc like this guy is doing in the presentation

                                      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

                                      That would be awesome. Page Inspector is a cool idea but still it is a fancy way of browsing. Still need to press ctrl + shift + Enter (same behavior for browsers).

                                      25 votes
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                                        1 comment  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                      • Enabling button for directly opening the search engine[Google/Bing] against each error encountered while debugging.

                                        Whenever we are getting some error[the error types can be classified ] while debugging,VS should provision with a single button named as "Google it" or "Bing it" against the error..so that user can directly click the button and see the results against that error in search engine instead of going to the search engine and type/paste the error and press enter.It will save developer time and improve productivity.

                                        10 votes
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                                          0 comments  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
                                        • Add dynamics support for AppSettings and ConnectionStrings in ConfigurationManager

                                          ConfigurationManager (and/or WebConfigurationManager) could have a really cool dynamics implementation, whereby they returned singleton instances when doing something like WebConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings.LocalSqlServer, which could return a type-specific instance of a SqlClient connection to my given connection string.

                                          4 votes
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                                            under review  ·  0 comments  ·  General ASP.NET  ·  Flag idea as inappropriate…  ·  Admin →
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