__top__ — Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express

#RetroDev #ASP.NET #WebForms #VisualStudio2010

Before layout components in React or Angular, we had Master Pages. Define your site header and footer once, and every content page just inherited the layout. It felt revolutionary. microsoft visual web developer 2010 express

For those who weren’t around, Visual Web Developer 2010 Express was Microsoft’s free, lightweight IDE for building ASP.NET Web Forms applications. It was part of the Visual Studio 2010 Express family (alongside C# Express, VB Express, etc.), but tailored specifically for the web. 1. Drag-and-Drop Web Forms You could literally drag a GridView or Login control from the Toolbox onto a .aspx page, wire it up to a SQL Server database using a few wizards, and have a fully functional data grid in minutes. No Web API, no JSON, no client-side frameworks. Just server-side magic. #RetroDev #ASP

April 14, 2026

I was digging through an old external drive today and found a backup of a project I built over 15 years ago using . It hit me just how much web development has changed — and how much I actually miss that era. For those who weren’t around, Visual Web Developer

Or better yet — tell me in the comments: what was the first web project you built with Visual Web Developer Express? — Mike, old-school .NET dev