I really like the developer toolbar in IE8 although I'm still getting familiar with it. I am in the process of putting the finishing touches to a new site for a client and was validating the CSS and the XHTML. The CSS passed on the first try, but the markup took a while. Initially it barked because of an ampersand in the footer credits, but changing this to the corresponding "&" special character entity number did the trick.
Then I got the following error: "No Character encoding declared at document level..." I am using XHTML 1.0 Transitional:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
After much ado, the solution was to add the following to the head section in the master page:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Up to now I have been using the Firefox developer toolbar and I would be lost without it, especially when working with CSS. The "CSS -> View Style Information" menu option has to be the best thing since sliced bread. Top of my to-do list this summer is to improve my JavaScript skills. I anticipate that the exercise will bring me into closer contact with Firebug which has a great reputation as a Javascript debugging tool. It will be interesting for me personally as a JavaScript novice to do a side-by-side comparison of the development/debugging experience with Firebug and the new JavaScript-friendly VS 2008. Has anyone got any takes on this?
Resources
* VS 2008 JavaScript Debugging
* VS 2008 JavaScript Intellisense
As part of the Government Leaders Forum - Americas, Microsoft has just announced the availability of professional-level developer and designer tools as well as training to students around the world, at no charge. Whether you are in university or high school, these is an amazing opportunity to prepare yourself for a successful career. The initiative is known as DreamSpark and you can visit the website for more information - check out the FAQ pages for details on how it all works. Students will need a Live ID account.
Thanks to Paul Andrew, SharePoint Technical Product Manager at Microsoft, for the heads up on the March CTP of Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS) 1.3. According to Paul: "we added some default permissions to the BIN deployed project templates. So you can now F5 debug the web part BIN deployed project as soon as it is created".
Installation was a snap, just be sure to uninstall any version of VSeWSS first. As always, be sure to read the release notes. Here is a snippet from said document: "VSeWSS 1.3 includes a web service that needs to run as a member of the local Administrators group. The web service is used by the Visual Studio extension to communicate with SharePoint and is restricted to local connections only. As a security precaution the installer does not add the account running the web service to the local Administrators group. You must do it".
What this means in plain English is that if you have Central Admin running under the administrator account on your dev machine, then you don't have to do anything. Just accept the defaults during the install. More details of the install process available on Kirk Evans' blog.
Note that this is not an official release version so it is not supported in a production environment. This is the last CTP before the new generation of SharePoint tools arrive with VS 2010. Read more about this on Soma Segar's blog.
Be sure to watch Kirk Evans' new series of screencasts on SharePoint development using the extensions:
* SharePoint Developer Series - Part I
* Consuming SharePoint Lists via Ajax