How to Get jQuery Intellisense Working with VS2008

Intellisense provides great assistance with anyone starting out with a new programming language. Learning jQuery from scratch, I've found this very much to be the case. Oh sure, one can develop in any language without such assistance. In fact, I have fond memories of teaching myself AutoLISP in the "ancient" year of 1990. Back then there was no Windows and the main IDE was the DOS equivalent of Notepad!

Anyhow, things have changed quite a bit since then and I immediately knew it would be great to have Intelisense working for jQuery! There are several steps involved though but through much trial & error I've finally got it working properly. Hopefully others will benefit from my efforts.


How Do You Know if jQuery Intellisense is Working?
Simply go to a location where you'd normally enter Javascript code and type a dollar sign ("$"). A pop-up menu will appear. What it displays gives you an immediate indication of whether jQuery Intellisense is functioning. Here's a development environment where it's not working:

And here's one where it is working:

In the second screenshot, notice that the first item is a single "$". This is positive! If you wanted to test it further, you could type a little more, like: $("div").
Something akin to the following should then appear in the pop-up menu:

Important Note: Every time I first load a project/solution into VS2008, the jQuery Intellisense does NOT work on the initial try!! I have to clear that menu, wait a few seconds and then try again. From then on it works perfectly, showing the single "$" as the first item in the pop-up menu.


Getting jQuery Intellisense Up & Running

1. Ensure that VS2008 SP1 is installed. (Further info)
2. Ensure that Hotfix KB958502 is installed. (Further info)
3. Install the jQuery library into your project. It'll have a filename like "jquery-1.3.2.js".
   
4. Install the jQuery Intellisense file into your project. It may very well have a filename like "jquery-1.3.2-vsdoc2.js" but must be renamed to be identical to the jQuery library name, plus "-vsdoc". Thus in this example, it must be renamed to "jquery-1.3.2-vsdoc.js".
   
5. Provide a reference to the jQuery library. There are generally two ways to do this, both of which are described below.
   
6. In external Javascript files a direct reference to the jQuery Intellisense file must be made. More details are provided below.
   

That's it. Once this is [properly] done then you can perform the simple test described earlier. I always prefer to shut down Visual Studio and start it up again with everything installed.


Referencing the jQuery Library and the jQuery Intellisense File
I'm a big believer in:

• Organizing a project's files into as many sub-folders as makes sense.
• Separating programming code from markup code as much as possible.

This is why my ASP.Net projects have this general structure:

Notice that there's a "Javascript" folder, which contains the jQuery Intellisense file, the jQuery library file, and an external Javascript file. Based on this file arrangement, either of the following approaches will work with an ASP.Net AJAX application:


You might be wondering why there's no reference to the jQuery Intellisense file? Well, as long as it follows the filename syntax shown in Step #4 above then it is automatically detected and loaded.


Accessing jQuery Intellisense in an External Javascript File
As mentioned previously, I like to place as much Javascript (and jQuery) code into external Javascript files (those ending in ".js") as is practical. If you use the same approach then you will face a disappointment if you're expecting Intellisense to work properly in such a file:

No jQuery Intellisense there!

The solution is very simple though. Just add a reference like this to the top of the file:

/// <reference path="jquery-1.3.2-vsdoc.js" />

Then the Intellisense you enjoy in ASPX files will also work in external Javascript files too! Here's an example:



Final Caveat
A little while ago I presented a way to programatically load jQuery entirely from server-side code. It does work and is powerful because a common server-side method could be built and then used in all of your projects. But jQuery Intellisense will not work using that approach; at least not with VS2008. Perhaps that will change in VS2010!

Mea Culpa re jQuery Intellisense

Prior to direct integration into their Visual Studio product, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make jQuery easy to use with VS2008. More specifically, they've provided a special patch that provides Intellisense support for jQuery development.

Try as I might though, I just couldn't get it installed on my computer. Whenever I tried, it told me that the supported product was not installed on my machine. Naturally I thought this was because I was running the 64-bit edition of Vista, which has caused some minor compatibility problems before.

I was incorrect. Thanks to the persistence of two Microsoft employees, Vishal Joshi and Joe Cartano, I finally realized my error: I did not have VS2008 SP1 installed. I thought I did for several reasons, not the least of which was because it was not appearing in Windows Update. In fact, when I first looked at the About screen to check, I saw "SP1" there ... but only later realized that it was for the .Net Framework v3.5, not for Visual Studio itself! Here's a screenshot showing you what to look for:

If that "SP" (circled in red) is not present then it's not installed.

So I installed SP1. It took about 20 minutes and then I had to restart Windows. After that I ran the patch, which is also known as "Hotfix KB958502". This time it recognized VS2008 and ran perfectly fine.

There is more to do though to get jQuery Intellisense working. I will describe the steps in my next post.

Upgrading Crystal Reports Files from VS2005 to VS2008

I just upgraded a fairly large project from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008. Everything went fairly smoothly but I did encounter hundreds of errors when I got around to upgrading the Crystal Reports data files.

In VS2005 I have a pair of files for each report:

• ReportName.rpt
• ReportName.xsd

where "ReportName" changes accordingly.

In VS2008, when you bring an XSD file into a project it creates 3 other files:

• ReportName.Designer.cs
• ReportName.xsc
• ReportName.xss

I didn't know the purpose of this trio but assumed they were necessary in VS2008.

In point of fact, all the conflicts occured within the ".Designer.cs" files. There are global variables in each one that cause repeat definitions of the same variables, which is not allowed.

So I did a little research and came across this blog entry. I ended up following just the first part, which was to delete the ".Designer.cs" and ".xss" files. Plus, because all the ".xsc" files were empty, I deleted them too.

Lo and behold, I rebuilt the solution but these excess files were never recreated. More importantly, the reports worked perfectly once again!

---

Update: One problem I've discovered with the above procedure is that you still end up with one warning message per report like this:

The custom tool 'MSDataSetGenerator' failed while processing the file 'Reports\Templates\MTHOBRK3.xsd'.

The application still runs but I don't like any such warning messages to be present. After a little trial & error I found this to be the ultimate solution:

1. Delete the .xsc & .xss files only.
2. Replace the entire contents of each .Designer.cs file with the following:

#pragma warning disable 1591

namespace Website.Reports.Templates
{
public partial class NewDataSet
{
}
}

#pragma warning restore 1591