Anyway, some days ago i finally found the solution and it’s called Meek. Meek was exactly what i described above. Extremely simple and it’s installed by just referencing a DLL and about 3-4 lines in web.Config. Well you can read all about it at their homepage.

I can also mention i had a small issue mostly because i have kind of a strange setup. I had to add the custom route because i didn’t have the default route in my Web.Config.

routes.MapRoute(
 "Meek", // Route name
 "Meek/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
 new { controller = "Meek", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
);

I also had to add the init line manually to my Application_Start method. I recorded a short video how it works on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Mvc9LMzts

Link: Meek

HTML Editor / ASP.Net

• You can now generate a event handler directly from the design source view. Before you had to go to the design view or use the “tab tab” feature in the code view to auto generate an event handler. Now you can do it from the asp server tag itself.
• Just as you can extract a method via the refactor context menu in the code editor you can now Extract a user control from the HTML view. So if you have a chunk of HTML that you feel would fit better in a user control you can just select it all, right click on it and choose to extract as a user control. VS will then create the new user control, reference it in the document and insert a tag for it. You have to move any code that reference any of the elements that you extracted manually though.
• If you change a a HTML tag in VS11 it will now also change the closing tag. It’s strange that this hasn’t been there before but I’m glad they finally added it.

CSS Editor

• I’m a CTRL K+D junkie and use it all the time to format my code. What bugged the hell out of me before was that in a CSS file the editor always scrolled up to the top of the document when i did this. It doesn’t do that anymore. In relation to this VS11 also intend CSS based on class. So .header h1 will get intended below .header.
• As much as I use the shortcut to format my document i use CTRL K+C  and CTRL K+U to comment and uncomment my code. This did not work in CSS files before but works now.
• I use border-radius and some other CSS3 features a lot and since some browsers requires vendor specific prefix for these it’s always a mess to have to write -moz-bla-bla and -webkit-bla-bla and so on. If you type border-radius in the Visual Studio 11 editor and then press tab twice it will automatically create these.

Page Inspector

The Page Inspector they added in Visual Studio 11 is just brilliant! It’s like Firebug but instead of seeing your generated HTML when you inspect elements you see the actual server side code that generates a specific element on your site. And it also works with CSS! No more hacking in Firebug to make something looks good and then remember what you changed and save it in the actual file and so on. As i said, it’s just brilliant! Right click on the project and choose “View in Page Inspector” to use it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7un1TwkAW0M

But it was when i tried to use some other importers that the problems got really serious. I did some googling and i found a site called Tumblr2Wordpress, beware of this exporter if you use WordPress 3.0. It says nothing on this site at all but as soon as you import to WordPress via the XML file produced from this site your site is more or less screwed. I got an error saying “Are you sure you want to do this? Please try again.” or something like that everytime i edited a post, saved a draft or tried to publish a post. I spend hours debugging this before i figured out it was this importer that caused this.

Finally i looked on the page about importing on WordPress.org and they actually warns about the Tumblr2Wordpress site and they provided a link to a site called Tumblr2wp that actually worked. To bad that site didn’t have better rank in Google, would have saved me hours of work and frustration. Hopefully someone will find this post at least if you are getting the same problems i had.

But i love GIT. It’s really simple and everything works more or less exactly as you expect it to do. But there isn’t much tools out there that integrates well with Visual Studio. There is Git Extensions for Windows and there is a project called Git Source Control Provider. The problem with Git Extensions is that it doesn’t do that much. It only ads a menu in Visual Studio where you can execute some command. Git Source Control Provider on the other hand looked like the perfect tool for me. But for some reason it didn’t sync correctly with my Git Repository and i got the feeling the project was a bit to immature to be trusted.

I always forget to commit

So, my biggest problem is that I always forget to fire up the command line / GUI and actually commit the changes i do the code. When you use SVN, TFS you get those nice little icons on all the files in Visual Studio so you are constantly reminded of your changes. This was what Git Source Control Provider promised but as i said, didn’t work for me.

I would be happy just to be reminded every time i publish my website to the ftp that “Hey! Don’t forget to commit your changes!”. And just to be clear. This is a solution for a one man shop that don’t really need “continuous integration” and loads of complicated stuff. I like my super simple solution where i just publish my project to my ftp and boom done!

My stupid hack

I found this post on Stack Overflow that explains how to run a MS Build target after you do a publish from Visual Studio. You just have to add this target at the end of your .csproj file. Your publish method must be a “WebDeploy”. I tried with “File System” but that didn’t work. The “WebDeploy” method was much faster anyway.

<Target Name="CustomPostPublishActions" AfterTargets="MSDeployPublish" >
    <Exec Command="&quot;C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin\wish.exe&quot; &quot;C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\libexec\git-core\git-gui&quot;" />
</Target>

That’s more or less all there is to it. This will fire up the GIT GUI and your Publish task won’t finish until you close that program. Of course you could probably just run the console instead if you prefer that.

Visual Studio has a featured to execute commands after the project is built and it felt like the simplest solution. I tried to add a command like robocopy c:\myproj\css c:\myandroidproj it worked but the thing was that i wanted to copy the folder AND the files in it and i couldn’t figure out how to to that. Maybe I’m just stupid, i don’t know.

Anyway i figured out how to do it in a good way finally.

robocopy $(ProjectDir) C:\Java\MyProj\assets\www\ *.html *.js *.css *.png *.gif *.jpg /S

This will copy all the specified filetype, ignore files like .csproj and stuff like that. The S stands for “Copy directory structure but ignore empty folders”.

Just run BatchOptimzeImage.exe <foldername> and it will optimize all the images in that folder. I wont give so much more instructions than this. And again .. ALL credits goes to Mads Kristensen for this on. I just wanted to put this out there so you don’t have to spend the hour i spent to make a console app out of it.

Download BatchImageOptimizer

The problem was that i used version ;MVC 2 in some of my projects (the one where the code for the Custom Action Result was located) and version MVC 3 in some other (the web project).

The thread on Stack Overflow about the issue.