Mads Kristensen

My personal blog about everything tech

This release has some cool features, some tweaks to existing ones and some bug fixes. Let’s take a tour and then go download it.

Automatic update to CSS schema files

The W3C continues to evolve the CSS specification and so do all the browser vendors. It’s therefore important to always keep up-to-date with the changes to take full advantage of the web platform. Web Essentials now automatically downloads new schema files whenever there is a change.

This is really cool, because Visual Studio will now always have the latest W3C specifications AND the latest vendor specific properties in Intellisense and validation. Latest schema files include support for Firefox 16, Opera 12.1 and all the rest.

This feature is very close to my heart.

Modernizr support

When writing any kind of modern web application, you can use Modernizr to fill in the gabs between old and new browsers. Modernizr is a JavaScript library that, among other things, places a lot of class names in the <html> element of web pages. These class names are very useful to utilize from CSS to provide graceful degradation for older browsers and now they are fully supported in the CSS editor.

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As you might be able to tell, two things are happing in the above screenshot.

  1. Modernizr specific class names are bolded
  2. Hierarchical indentation supports the class names and indent correctly

I like this feature because it makes it very clear and transparent what is going on when using Modernizr.

Minification

Through a right-click menu in Solution Explorer, it is now possible to create .min files from both CSS and JavaScript files.

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The .min file will be nested under it’s parent source file.

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Every time a change is saved in the parent styles.css file, the styles.min.css file is automatically updated with the minified version of its parent.  The right-click gesture works on both individual CSS and JavaScript files, but also on folders, which will then create min files for all CSS or JavaScript files in that folder.

It only handles minification, not multi-file bundling. That’s coming in the next update.

CSS/LESS document outline

Get a sneak-peek inside any CSS or LESS file directly from Solution Explorer.

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For CSS it will display @-directives, IDs and class names used in the file. For LESS it will also show the Mixins and variables used. You can navigate this outline using only the keyboard and have each item open up automatically in the Preview Tab.

W3C only

Tired of Intellisense for non-W3C properties, @-directives, pseudo elements and property values? You can now chose to only see the W3C standards. Using any vendor specifics will result in a validation error. Is this strange? Perhaps. Let me know!

Shorthand validation

This is a work in progress, but I wanted to include the early bits in this version. The CSS validator will now throw an error if you use properties that should be rolled into a shorthand expression. For instance, if you use margin-top, margin-right, margin-bottom and margin-left in the same rule, it will tell you to combine the properties into margin. Full parsing and validation is coming in a future version.

Nested LESS selector Intellisense

When writing nested selectors in LESS you will run into a very annoying problem with pseudo selectors. The Intellisense list will force you to write a pseudo selector when you in fact just wanted a colon. This is now fixed.

Source Control

The LESS, CoffeeScript and TypeScript compilers doesn’t know how to check files out of source control before they try to compile and override the output file. Web Essentials will now check out the right files to avoid write permission issues.

New options structure

The Tools –> Options dialog has been updated with even more options and with a more granular structure.

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This makes it easier to search for specific items using Quick Launch (CTRL + Q) and also makes it less cluttered.

Minor improvements

Beyond the features mentioned, a lot of small tweaks and fixes also made it in to this release. Here are some of them:

  • Cleaned up right-click menu
  • Added minification inside the CSS and JavaScript editors
  • Disallow zero values in CSS (0px, 0%, 0em etc. should not have the unit)
  • TypeScript now supports ES5 correctly
  • TypeScript compiler switches now featured in the options dialog
  • General bug fixes

As always, let me know if you run into issues or have some ideas for new features or tweaks.

You should download Web Essentials 1.4 right now!

I was debating whether to call this release version 1.1 or 2.0 because it contains quite a lot of new functionality. I’ve decided to stick with 1.1 since it also features a lot of fixes and tweaks to the current functionality. Download it at the VS Gallery. Now, let’s take a tour of the new features.

Option dialog

This was the top requested feature from the original Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2010. It finally made it in.

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You can set the most important options through this dialog. If I forgot some options, please let me know so I can add them for the next release.

JSHint for JavaScript

JSHint is a really good way of making sure your JavaScript follows certain coding guidelines and best practices. The default settings are very relaxed, but you can turn on more rules through the new options dialog.

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The error window updates as you type, so you don’t have to right-click the .js file to kick off JSHint. It happens as you write.

Better LESS and CoffeeScript

The LESS editor has been updated with the latest functionality that is needed to truly take advantage of LESS. This includes:

  • Support for @import directives
  • Intellisense across imported .less files for Mixins and variables
  • All the validation from the CSS editor now shows up in LESS
  • Both CoffeeScript and LESS now uses the official compilers
  • Compiles and creates a .css/.js file when a LESS/CoffeeScript file is saved in VS

JavaScript regions

Some people hate them, other people loves them. This is a feature that was in the original Web Essentials 2010 an by popular request now made it in the 2012 version.

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Re-embed base64 dataURIs

The problem with embedding your images as base64 dataURI’s is to keep it up-to-date with the original image file as it changes. Now you can.

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Vendor help for @-directives

Vendor specific validation and Smart Tags are now also available for @-directives.

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New performance validation

Three new validators have been added that analyses the CSS for general performance issues. They validation the following:

  1. Small images should be inlined (base64 embedded)
  2. Don’t use the universal selector (the star)
  3. Don’t over qualify ID selectors

They can be turned on/off in the new options dialog.

Other small features

  • Simple-selector highlighting like C#’s identifier highlighting
  • Option to place validation messages in either Messages, Warnings or Errors
  • Diff any 2 files in Solution Explorer. Might be useful for diffing LESS and CSS
  • Collapse long base64 dataURI’s
  • Auto-insert closing curly with type-through support
  • New LESS and CoffeeScript item templates. More to come in next version

Bug fixes

Thank you so much for reporting bugs. That is really helpful and increases the quality of the extension in general. Here are some of the bugs reported by the users:

  • Invalid LESS and CoffeeScript would result in an ugly error message and crash VS sometimes
  • Intellisense for animation-name now also applies to animation
  • LESS formatting for negative units no longer inserts an invalid space
  • Dark theme now works for the browser support tooltip
  • Mustache/Handlebars no longer screws up JSON strings
  • Wrongly inserted color swatches for LESS variables

Download

Visual Studio 2012 will alert you of this update if you already have the previous version of Web Essentials installed. If not or VS didn’t alert you yet, go download it at the VS Gallery.