Per Magne Skuseth
Aug 20, 2013
  7115
(1 votes)

Quick tip: EPiServer, Visual Studio 2013 Preview & IIS Express issue

I installed Visual Studio 2013 Preview a little while ago, and have not had any serious issues with it. However, when running a site using IIS Express, edit mode just showed a blank page, rendering it useless.

editerror

The fix was pretty simple: uncheck enable browser link in VS:

enablebrowserlink

After doing this, things were back to normal.
If you want to know more about the new “Enable Browser Link” feature, you can read more about it here.
Please note that this is a VS issue, and not an EPiServer issue, which will be fixed in the upcoming release of VS.


Adding error messages and keywords below, so it will turn up in search results as well (you can stop reading now).

artery // Uncaught ReferenceError: WebForm_AutoFocus is not defined // __vwd/js/artery // SyntaxError: missing ; after for-loop condition

Aug 20, 2013

Comments

Aug 26, 2013 09:56 PM

Depressing that browswr link is causing this. I saw that umbraco cms was also having problems with browser link.

Hope you've filed a bug on vs2013 feedback for this because browser link looks quite promising.

Per Magne Skuseth
Per Magne Skuseth Jan 19, 2014 01:31 PM

This has been fixed in the official release of vs 2013.

Mark Price
Mark Price Aug 15, 2016 06:08 PM

Annoyingly, the bug appears to be back in Visual Studio 2015!

Last week I was happily using Visual Studio 2015 with Update 3 to create several Episerver sites including Alloy, but this morning Edit View was broken in all my sites. Interestingly, it *almost* worked in Firefox but was completely blank in Microsoft Edge and Chrome. I have *no* idea what I changed to break it.

Googling for "episerver edit view blank" and similar suggested fixes such as clearing the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder, re-installing Visual Studio, resetting IIS and so on. Finally I decided to install Visual Studio 2013 and open the same projects. Everything worked. Opening the same projects again in VS2015--broken Edit View! Both had Browser Link enabled, but I decided to try disabling Browser Link only in VS2015. Success!

A quick Google led to this page. If only I had considered Browser Link to be the problem earlier!

Per Magne Skuseth
Per Magne Skuseth Aug 16, 2016 09:35 AM

Mark: Perhaps the error you got was related to the Visual Studio Web Accessibility Checker? See these threads:

http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/-Episerver-75-CMS/Thread-Container/2016/8/episerver-and-visual-studio-web-accessibilty-checker/

http://world.episerver.com/forum/developer-forum/-Episerver-75-CMS/Thread-Container/2016/8/dojo-error-and-episervercms-only-showing-top-menu/

Mark Price
Mark Price Aug 19, 2016 10:12 AM

Yes, Per, I think you're right. At least I now can reenable Browser Link if I disable that extension.

Please login to comment.
Latest blogs
Building a Custom RAG for Optimizely Opal

How to design a standalone RAG service for documents that don't belong in Optimizely One, and expose it to Opal and other AI tools without coupling...

Michał Mitas | May 14, 2026 |

Semantic Search - Deep Dive

Deep dive into semantic search with Optimizely Graph

Michał Mitas | May 14, 2026 |

Building a Custom RAG for Optimizely Opal

Opal's built-in knowledge is limited to content inside Optimizely One. Here's how to design a custom RAG service for documents that live outside th...

Michał Mitas | May 14, 2026 |

The Fragment Conundrum

Explore the challenges and opportunities of working with Optimizely SaaS, GraphQL fragments, and headless CMS architectures. Learn practical...

Andy Blyth | May 13, 2026 |