Code Optimized Web Development Profile (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

This post covers another useful improvement in VS 2010 - HTML/ASP.NET/JavaScript snippet support. Snippets allow you to be more productive within source view by allowing you to create chunks of code and markup that you can quickly apply and use in your application with a minimum of character typing.

Visual Studio has supported the concept of "snippets" for VB and C# in previous releases - but not for HTML, ASP.NET markup and JavaScript. With VS 2010 we now support snippets for these content types as well.

.NET 4 includes a new version of the CLR, and a new .NET 4 specific machine.config file (which is installed side-by-side with the one used by .NET 2, .NET 3 and .NET 3.5).

The new .NET 4 machine.config file now automatically registers all of the ASP.NET tag sections, handlers and modules that we've added over the years, including the functionality for:

.ASP.NET AJAX
.ASP.NET Dynamic Data
.ASP.NET Routing (which can now be used for both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC)
.ASP.NET Chart Control (which now ships built-into ASP.NET V4)
What this means is that when you create a new "Empty ASP.NET application" project in VS 2010, you'll find that the new default application-level web.config file is now clean and simple:

VS 2010 and .NET 4 are the next major releases of our developer tools and framework. Together they contain a ton of new functionality and improvements that I think you'll really like, and which make building applications of all types easier, faster and better. The improvements range from nice small tweaks to major, major enhancements - and can be found across the .NET Framework, the languages, and the IDE.

Many exciting changes for ASP.NET are coming in the .NET Framework version 4. This document gives an overview of many of the new features that are included in the Beta 2 release of the .NET Framework 4 and of Visual Studio 2010.

In Part I of this article series we have seen some features available to Silverlight 4 with VS 2010. We will continue to explore more in this article.

Building a spelling checker for source code as an extension for visual studio 2010.

It's no secret that I am thrilled with the new social features of SharePoint 2010. I am most excited about the new Profile Picture handling. I strongly believe that the more we can show the faces of our colleagues to one another the more connected we will feel. Clearly Microsoft feels that way as witnessed by the many features that make use of the Profile Image like the Activity Feed and Colleagues list