Comments on: Improving client-side development in Visual Studio

By: Avi Pinto

Avi Pinto — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 07:17:56 +0000

Thanks Mads for the extension, installed it and it’s awesome!

By: Mads Kristensen

Mads Kristensen — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 03:05:08 +0000

Most of the suggested features are available for Visual Studio 2010 through the free extension Web Essentials http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/6ed4c78f-a23e-49ad-b5fd-369af0c2107f

By: Dave Ward

Dave Ward — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:22:34 +0000

It definitely has some nice improvements. You can download the “Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview” on MSDN and use it today if you’re inclined. I’ve been using it in place of VS2010 since BUILD and it has been stable. Since it doesn’t require converting the projects to a VS11-only format like VS2010 did, it’s safe to go ahead and give it a try early without having to worry about painting yourself into a corner.

By: KD

KD — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 22:58:42 +0000

Hey guys,

I had a sneak peak at the next Visual Studio release at the BUILD conference a couple weeks back. A lot of these features are coming in the next release. I saw the color picker for CSS, they also showed go to function in javascript and also all the javascript functions in a drop down like in the .NET code. They also have a way to optimize all your project’s image files, and best of all, minify and bundling of javascript and css files is all built in! I’m excitedly looking forward to its release.

By: Chris Maunder

Chris Maunder — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 10:01:08 +0000

We’ve been using .less. The support for .config files is great, but it really is high time this gets baked into the IDE.

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 09:01:41 +0000

Hi there,

Great, common sense!

I know I’m late to the party but I cannot agree with this more. Having come from a PHP background, working with the Eclipse IDE, to C# based web development with VS2008, the sudden increase in how bloody difficult it was to work with css and js was a shocker. Ouch.

My workaround is to have eclipse running at the same time as VS 2008 and edit my JS and CSS in that – it was simply taking too long to navigate around my JS docs.

Resharper 6, currently on beta, is adding JS code navigation and some other stuff too.

Good news for me is that we’re getting VS2010 soon, so I’ll give jsenhancements a go.

Thanks for putting into a well ordered, FAO Microsoft list what I’ve been thinking.

By: Adolfo

Adolfo — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:49:58 +0000

I have a dream for VS2011.
A add-on that with a caption: “kill your graphic designer”
xD

By: Dave Ward

Dave Ward — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 23:36:53 +0000

I think we can expect a VS2010 service pack that improves the client-side experience sooner than v.Next, like VS2008′s sp1 added JavaScript code completion.

The new extensibility model makes it much easier to write plugins to address these issues too (like the JSEnhancements plugin I referenced in the post). Hopefully, as that ecosystem matures, we’ll begin seeing lots of small plugins to make specific improvements, which can be continually improved as necessary.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:31:02 +0000

Unless Microsoft releases an extension that gives us some of these ideas, then we will unfortunately never see them until Visual Studio 2012 (or whatever year we get the next version). I’m not saying I’d still love to have them, but I just wish Microsoft could release smaller updates to some of its products more frequently (like Chrome’s release schedule). This has technically been done for some other products through an “out-of-band” release, like the Silverlight Toolkit, but I’d like to see them just update the actual product. Maybe if most of visual studio was just a bunch of extensions, then they could update any of those extensions separately (like one for the designer). Instead, we have to wait years most of the time. Anyway, these are some great ideas for CSS and Javascript.

By: Dave Ward

Dave Ward — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 22:16:37 +0000

JSLint has its uses, but its recommendation on function() vs. function () is purely Crockford’s style preference. His reasoning there made a little sense before JavaScript syntax highlighting was commonplace, but it’s rare to find non-VS2010-formatted JavaScript that uses that style these days. There’s something awkward about that space.

That change from VS2008 to VS2010 was similar to switching the default C# brace formatting from Allman to K&R and dropping support for Allman at the same time.

By: Brad Wilson

Brad Wilson — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:30:14 +0000

Re: the spacing after the word “function”

This agrees with the recommendations of JSLint. In fact, I’ve found that JSLint and VS 2010 generally agree on document formatting in all regards except one: VS 2010 wants to indent case statements, and JSLint wants them to line up with the switch statement.

By: Thomas Kadlec

Thomas Kadlec — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:44:18 +0000

Good article I liked almost all of those ideas. I’ve especially found CSS editing and formatting lacking in Visual Studio. I completely agree that indenting style sheets based on depth helps readability and comprehension a lot.

By: Amadeus

Amadeus — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:52:23 +0000

Agree def. with all the issues pointed.

Using ctrl+shift+f to do anything in client-side dev. is a workaround, but i alway prefer other editors rather than VS because of the lacking features…

By: Ben Amada

Ben Amada — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:48:10 +0000

As you said in your UPDATE, having most of these enhancement as Options would be best, since everyone has their own style.

I liked most of your suggestions, except for automatic reordering of CSS styles by property name. I intentionally group the properties by their “type”. Example, margin and padding together. If absolutely positioned, then position, left, top, right and bottom together. For fonts, I group font family, size, color together. Etc.

I’m usually not happy when VS decides to reformat things on its own. Back in the VS 2002/2003 days, it did this a lot. I generally prefer what I type is left alone. JS is one area where I think since VS 2010, it tends to indent blocks of code incorrectly — or at least unintuitively to me. I think it can be turned off, but then it might turn off too much.

By: Ashfaq

Ashfaq — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:22:17 +0000

Thank you for your wonderful post. After jQuery comes into action, I think I spent more time in writing javaScript than writing server side code. I agree with your post and it would be great to have all those(color picker, CSS Outlining, JavaScript formating ) into VS 2010. But I think VS team should include two more thing. Use of “Ctl +M +O”, which is a nice feature in .cs/.vb file and at the time of writing inline js on a file I want to see that control name pops-up. For example, when I write something like

$(‘#’).val()

It would be great help if as soon as I press <%= all controls name pop-up. That would save a lot of time on coding. What do you think Dave?

Ashfaq