Here’s a feature that you might have missed in Visual Studio 2013 RC. It’s one of my absolute favorite features because it solves a very common problem that I often run into when building websites.

I think it’s better to just show you what this feature does instead of writing about it. Check out the video below.

This means you no longer have to manually add references to any JavaScript file in order to get Intellisense for that file. When auto-sync is enabled in /Scripts/_references.js then you will always have Intellisense for all your .js files in your project no matter where they are located.

A little while back, Sayed Hashimi and I built the Web Developer Checklist Chrome extension as a companion for the website webdevchecklist.com. We built the extension in Visual Studio and quickly realized that we could optimize the development experience substantially by tweaking the build process along with other details.

From that experience, we now have a project template that contains all you need for writing a Chrome extension and it is available for download.

The project template gives you the following features:

• JavaScript Intellisense for the Google Chrome object model
• Folder structure suited for production ready Google Chrome extensions
• MSBuild integration to produce .zip files to upload to the Google Web Store

It’s all explained in this short demo video.

As always, this project template is open source on GitHub.

Download the Visual Studio project template

Here’s a Channel9 video where Sayed explains how he modified the build system for this template if you’re interested. It starts around 13 minutes in.