My Web Development Set Up in Visual Studio

I currently use Visual Studio (almost exclusively) for my web development, along with the developer console for debugging.

I’ve dabbled with Brackets.io and Visual Studio Code both of which have some interesting features, particularly VS Code with its upcoming support for glTF. In future, I hope to use VS Code and Brackets.io more often, but for now I’ve used VS for many years and that’s what I’m comfortable with.

web.config

From How to: Create Web.config Files.

  1. In Solution Explorer, click the Refresh icon to make sure that a Web.config file does not already exist for your application.
    If you have already used the Web Site Administration Tool or some other means of configuring your application, a Web.config file might have been created automatically. Clicking Refresh updates your file list.
  2. In Solution Explorer, right-click your Web site name, and then click Add New Item.
  3. In the Templates window, click Web Configuration File.
    The file name in the Name text box should be Web.config. You can give the file another name, but this is the default. The .config file name extension is protected from being downloaded by ASP.NET.
  4. Click Add to create the file and open it for editing.

Anyway, VS needs a bit of tweaking to minimise friction while web dev’ing. Below is the web.config file I like to use–


  
 
     
    
 
    
 
    
    
    
    
  

Line 2. I really don’t like IIExpress moaning about not finding files, and prefer to be able to navigate to a page if I make a typo.
Lines 4+. More about allowing 3D files types than web dev :). “.obj” can be problematic as it’s also an intermediate compilation type when building files in VS.