Microsoft spruces up HTML capabilities in Visual Studio

Microsoft says it will make it easier to deal with HTML in the next release of its Visual Studio IDE, dubbed vNext, but it won't say when vNext will come out.

The HTML Editor capability in vNext will help developers quickly accomplish common tasks, said Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the company's developer division, in a blog post on Visual Studio's ASP.Net Web development platform. He said Visual Studio will be able to activate the "smart tasks" features of ASP.Net server controls, as well as connect server control event handlers without needing to switch to the vNext editor's design view.

ASP.NET and MVC capability improvements

Also on the horizon are improvements to ASP.Net Web forms and MVC (model-view-controller) capabilities, such as support for strongly typed data templates. "We've added the ability to declare what type of data a control is going to be bound to, by way of a new ModelType property on data controls," Guthrie said. "Setting this property will cause two new typed variables to be generated in the scope of the data-bound template expressions: Item and BindItem." Developers can use the variables in data-binding expressions and get IntelliSense and compile-time checking. Strongly typed data control support makes it easier to work with data-bound expressions, Guthrie said.

Similarly, Web forms will feature model-binding capabilities intended to simplify working with code-focused data access logic while retaining benefits of a two-way data-binding framework, Guthrie said. He claimed it will simplify work with code-focused data-access paradigms.