In September, there was a post on the blog that introduced the VSPackage Builder, a tool for VS extension developers that provides a designer experience over the Visual Studio Command Table (VSCT) file.

 

In particular, Package Builder makes it easy to add commands and UI to the VSCT incrementally – a task that’s proven somewhat challenging to many extenders. Another article, by Ty Anderson, that shows off those incremental features was published recently on DevX.com. Check it out!

You can download VSPackage Builder from the Visual Studio Gallery.

The pack offers three free Silverlight controls for incredibly rich UI and data visualization – Book, Gauge and TileView. The controls feature the full functionality of their commercial versions, thus offering lean and intuitive API, Expression Blend support, Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 support and built-in Office Black theme.

On Tuesday Posted about the recent release of the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build.  You can read more about it here.

This post is a quick follow-up post that discusses a few installation issues that we’ve seen people run into - and how to fix them:

ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and C#/VB Async CTP

Two weeks ago the VS languages team released an early preview of some cool language improvements to VB and C# that we are working on for asynchronous programming.  Unfortunately it isn’t possible to have both the Async CTP and the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC installed on the same machine at the same time.  You instead need to choose one or the other right now – installing both will cause problems.

If you’ve already installed the Async CTP and want to install the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC, then you need to use Add/Remove Programs and uninstall the Async CTP.  Once it is uninstalled, then you can safely install the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build on your machine without problems.

If you’ve already installed both the Async CTP and ASP.NET MVC 3 RC on the same machine, then you will likely experience issues in VS with debugging (and potentially other things) not working.  To fix this, go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall both the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build (including the VS Tools components for it) and the Async CTP. Once you’ve uninstalled both your machine will be back to a clean state and working fine.  You can then choose to install either the Async CTP or ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and it will work fine.

Razor Intellisense and Resharper

ReSharper is a popular product from JetBrains that enhances Visual Studio’s intellisense and code editing features.  If you have ReSharper installed and want to take advantage of the Razor intellisense support we added to the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build, please read this blog post from JetBrains which discusses ways to use them together today.

NuPack/NuGet Schema and Feed Updates

We’ve made some schema and feed modifications to NuGet since the original preview release of it that will prevent you from updating packages that were added with the original preview build.  When updating to the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC, you’ll need to delete your existing packages and re-add them to your project to account for this.  You can do this by deleting the packages from disk, and then run the install-package command again. 

Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 RC build includes several additional feature refinements (in addition to bug fixes, tooling improvements, perf tunings, etc).  This blog post covers the improvementsspecific to today’s release.  Please review my previous posts to learn more about the many, many other ASP.NET MVC 3 features and improvements introduced in prior previews/betas.

 

Razor Intellisense within Visual Studio

Colorization and intellisense support for Razor-based view templates is now supported within Visual Studio and the free Visual Web Developer Express.

Intellisense works for HTML, C#, VB, JavaScript and CSS when editing within razor based view templates: