This weekend I started playing with Automated Builds in TFS 2008. Over the next few weeks I am going to setup automated builds for my various projects so I can start running automated integration testing and automated staging releases at certain intervals (nightly, weekly, etc). Unfortunately I hit a snag when I tried building one of my solutions that contained a Web Application Project. After some digging around, I eventually opened up the “Release.txt” log file which can be found in the deployment directory, I found the following error: error MSB4019: The...

Today I just stumbled onto some interesting information regarding placements of script blocks and CSS links. According to some extensive testing performed at Yahoo!, they have published a list of Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. Many of these rules came as no surprise, for example: While researching performance at Yahoo!, we discovered that moving stylesheets to the document HEAD makes pages load faster. This is because putting stylesheets in the HEAD allows the page to render progressively. However, one rule caught my attention: Rule 5 described how stylesheets near the bottom of the page prohibit progressive rendering, and how...

Honestly, I'm not sure if this setting is new to Visual Studio 2008 or not, but I just stumbled onto it. Typically when I'm debugging an ASP.NET application I test one page at a time, by right-clicking on the aspx and selecting View in Browser.   I prefer this method because I can keep the browser open at all times during development and not have to compile the whole site to quickly test something simple like markup changes. The caveat to this however, is that the Visual Studio debugger is not attached to the cassini process,...