I like the compiler to catch as many errors as possible before I start debugging or release my application. This also applies to code nuggets in ASP.NET MVC views, especially since these are not easily unit-testable. But views are not validated at compilation, at least not when using the standard settings for ASP.NET MVC projects.

Tools like Resharper can notify you of syntax errors within your views, but you can still build the project and not get a single error. Instead, your application will crash when trying to evaluate the buggy view.

Fortunately you can easily make Visual Studio compile your views along with the rest of your code. (more…)

My current web project includes some <select> elements with <group> children to represent projects belonging to certain customers.

Unfortunately there is no way  to style native <select> elements and Firefox lacks proper indentation for the <option> elements belonging to groups. This leads to a very confusing layout:

So I used the jQuery.Selectmenu plugin to style the <select> elements in a clean and consistent way across all browsers:

Unfortunately the plugin does not seem to be maintained by the jquery.ui group anymore. I made a few minor changes to the plugin so that it works with jquery.ui 1.8 and properly displays groups with space characters.

The plugin is no longer maintained on the jquery.ui wiki, so I am simply uploading my version here:

Visual Studio 2008 has been running quite smoothly on my computer until this week. But then it started randomly hanging when opening an .aspx .ascx .master file. The problem even occurred when opening the file in isolation, instead of opening the file as part of a solution. Deactivating all add-ins did not help.

Fortunately It seems I just found the solution: After uninstalling the “Microsoft Visual Studio Web authoring Component”, the problem seems have to have disappeared. I’m not even sure what this component does, but it seems to be a relict from Visual Studio 2005 and so far I have not noticed any missing features since I uninstalled it.