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Tip #103: Adding the New Website and Open Website buttons to the VS2010 Start Page

In the new VS2010 UI, the start page has been completely re-written.  Part of the changes made were to hide the New Website and Open Website buttons.  Basically it went from the old look in VS2008:

vs2008_startPage

To the new look in VS2010:

vs2010_noWebControls

Of course, ASP.NET website projects are still around and not going away soon.  Here’s a very quick way to make them show up on the Start Page again.

  1. Download the StartPageWeb.zip file linked here
  2. Extract StartPageWeb.xaml and copy it into your Documents\Visual Studio 10.0\StartPages folder
  3. Open Visual Studio 2010 and open Tools –> Options.  Find the option under Environment –> Startup, and set the Customize Start Page dropdown to point at the new XAML file.

That’s it!  Now your start page will look like this:

vs2010_webControls

Note: you may get a security warning that the file is not trusted.  This is due to downloading it from the scary Internet.  From Windows Explorer, you can right-click the file, select Properties, and then select the Unblock button by the bottom:

unblock_file

Hope you find this helpful!

- Jimmy Lewis
SDET | Visual Web Developer team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2010
    What do you do if your My Documents are redirected to the network?  I get the error: "Can not load custom Start Page <Path>/StartPageWeb.xaml from a restricted location."  Any information you can provide is much appreciated.

  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2010
    @webmannetwork - I've just posted a follow up to this blog post.  Apparently there's a better way to customize start pages and the loose .xaml method is a "legacy" feature from Beta 2.  Check out the new post and let me know if it works: http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevelopertips/archive/2010/04/23/tip-103-revisited.aspx

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2011
    The comment has been removed