I installed the latest beta version of Visual Studio.NET (Community Technology Preview March 2004) last week. I was looking forward to experimenting with the new ASP.NET 2.0 bits this weekend. There was a lot of cool stuff in the previous Whidbey release, and I've heard that ASP.NET is getting better by the day.
So I sit down and try to create a new ASP.NET website. I open up the File Menu and look for the ASP.NET templates.
Nope not there. Where can they be? I know that I've seen them in the PDC2003 build. Hmmm.
So I start thinking about this. The last demo I saw used C#. One great new feature of VS.NET 2005 (formerly named Whidbey) is that you can save your settings and export/import them. It happens that I chose VB.NET as my preferred settings when I started VS.NET 2005.
Please, I can hear the comments from the gallery now. Ahh, he chose VB.NET - that explains it.
I figure I will import the C# settings and see if I can create a ASP.NET application that way. Sure enough, after loading the C# I can see the Asp.NET web template. OK, I see that it is on the File menu, maybe I missed that back in the VB setup. Guess I'll reload the VB.NET settings.
After importing the VB settings I check the File menu. Nope. It's not there! Yeah, I see that the menu has an Open Web Site but I still can't create a NEW website.
Yes, incredible as it seems, VB programmers are now excluded from creating ASP.NET applications. Do you suppose Microsoft thinks that it is too hard for the poor, feeble VB programmer to figure out how to be a web programmer? Remember when the VB team decided that they weren't going to have a 'refactoring' menu for VB because the average VB programmer wouldn't know what refactoring was? Maybe we should call it 'changing code' or 'modify code' or....
Do you think that's what it is? Naw, that's not it at all. It's probably a bug introduced in the rush to get VS.NET 2005 out in time for DevDays.
The Fix
The simple solution: customize your menus.
- Right click the menu
- Choose customize
- Select the Commands tab.
- Select the File item in the listbox.
- Drag the New Website item to your menu.
- Done
