Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Announcing HTML5 & CSS3 support for Visual Studio 2010 SP1

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Since the last few months it feels like web standards are moving at pace that we would really like them to move. Every browser is pushing the envelope ahead including our very own IE9. For the first time it feels like web is getting the extra freedom of expression that it deserves and we want to contribute to that.

ASP.NET developers have been asking for HTML5 & CSS3 support all the time and today we are super excited to announce the public availability of Visual Studio Web Standards Update which brings a ton of HTML5 & CSS3 support to Visual Studio 2010 SP1. VS Web Standards Update is a free extension available for anyone who is using Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and it provides HTML5 & CSS3 support based on current W3C specifications.

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HTML5

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VS Web Standards Update provides you intellisense and validation for most common HTML 5 features like:

· Video & related tags

· Audio & related tag

· New input types like email, url, date etc

· Drag & Drop support

· Accessibility standard WAI-ARIA

· Microdata

· Schema.org & more SEO friendly goodness

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Browser APIs

· Geo-Location - Having location aware websites is growing trend and now you will have full intellisense and validation within Visual Studio for creating websites which are location aware. For sample view the source for the IE9 test drive demo.

· Local Storage – IE has been supporting local storage from IE8 onwards, now Visual Studio will provide you with full fidelity intellisense to create sites which can save state within browser. For sample of try view source on HTML5 Demo Site

CSS3

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This update supports intellisense and validation for most of the CSS3 modules including:

· 2D Transforms

· 3D Transforms

· Animations

· Background & Borders

· Basic Box Model

· Basic UI

· Behavior

· Color

· Flexible Box Layout

· Fonts

· Generated Content for Paged Media

· Hyperlink Presentation

· Line

· Lists

· Marquee

· Media Queries

· Multi Column

· Namespaces

· Paged Media

· Presentations Levels

· Ruby

· Selectors

· Speech

· Syntax

· Template Layout

· Text

· Transitions

Additionally, if you are trying to make websites which work on a variety of platforms and browsers you will love the fact that Web Standards Update not only supports IE specific prefixes like –ms; but also other vendor prefixes like –webkit and –moz.

With all of the above goodness we hope you all will enjoy this update as much as we did creating it and hope you will share the good news with our larger developer community.

Sharable Links

· Download URL - http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a15c3ce9-f58f-42b7-8668-53f6cdc2cd83

· VWD Team Announcement post by Mads - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2011/06/15/web-standards-update-for-visual-studio-2010-sp1.aspx

· Walkthrough post by Hanselman - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingTheWebStandardsUpdateHTML5SupportForTheVisualStudio2010Editor.aspx

Finally, I want to call out that this update is made feasible due to heroic efforts by a lot our team members working on their personal spare time, so please give a huge shout out to our team including Mads Kristensen, Peter Spada, Van Kichline, Aliaksei Baturytski, Damian Edwards, Barry Tang, Bala Chirtsabesan, Alex Gavrilov, Xinyang Qiu, Jon Jung, Scott Hanselman, Teri Schroeppel & Yong Lee.

Thanks again!!

Vishal R. Joshi | http://vishalrjoshi.com | @vishalrjoshi

PS: The Web Standards Update works on both VS 2010 SP1 and VWD Express 2010 SP1. Being a VS Extension, it does not support certain CSS3 selector syntax & Browser API intellisense which would require servicing the shipping bits.