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.

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.

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.

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.

Vendor help for @-directives

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

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.

The CSS editor in Visual Studio has unprecedented support for both W3C standards and vendor specific properties, pseudos and @-directives. See the full list here. However, not all vendor specific prefixes are supported, just the major ones: -moz-, -ms-, -o- and -webkit-. In case you have to target really old versions of Safari, it would be nice to have -khtml- as well. Visual Studio 2012 makes it very easy to add support for new properties or to augment existing ones with additional values.

An easy VS extension

Visual Studio extensions or VSIX packages as they are called, have a reputation of being notoriously difficult to write and the documentation is lacking. For adding your own custom schema to the CSS editor, this is most definitely not the case. In fact, it couldn’t be easier.

Step 1: Download and install the Visual Studio 2012 SDK

The SDK is needed for Visual Studio to know how to open extensibility project types.

Step 2: Download the CustomCssSchema project  and open it in VS2012

This project contains the custom -khtml- schema and the ability to compile into an extensibility package – a VSIX. The project is very small as shown below.

The only 2 files we care about for this scenario are the /Schemas/css-vendor-khtml.xml and KhtmlSchemaProvider.cs files. The rest of the files are used by the VSIX to display the right icons and descriptions in the Visual Studio Extension Manager as well as on the VS Gallery website. They are pretty self-explanatory once you open them and look at what they do.

The CSS schema

The css-vendor-khtml.xml schema file is not a complete KHTML schema. It is merely an examples to get you started. Check it out here. It makes it possible to create brand new properties, pseudos and @-directives. You can even inherit from properties already supported by VS and you can add additional property values to existing properties. It’s all explained in the XML file.

The schema provider class

The KhtmlSchemaProvider class is responsible for registering your XML schema file with the CSS editor. It is really simple as you can see below:

That’s all the class does.

Get started

After downloading the SDK and the CustomCssSchema project, just hit F5 in Visual Studio. That launches an instance of Visual Studio. This extensibility instance is called the Experimental instance. Now open a .css file in the Experimental instance and check to see if the -khtml- properties are present in Intellisense. If they are, you are ready to start customizing the css-vendor-khtml.xml file.

The different ways to extend the schema is all explained inside the css-vendor-khtml.xml file itself, so I won’t go in to details here.

You can add multiple XML schema files. As many as you like, actually. Just make sure to create corresponding SchemaProvider classes as well.

Publishing the extension

You are now done with your custom CSS schema extension and want to put it on the VS Gallery for everyone to download. First, you need to locate the .vsix file that is produced every time you build the CustomCssSchema project. It’s in the bin folder.

Now go to the VS Gallery website and sign in using your Live ID credentials. After signing in, this button becomes visible:

Click it. It takes you to the first step of the little upload wizard.

Choose “Tool” and click Next to show the next step where you are going to upload the .vsix file.

Step 3 is basically about adding some tags and descriptions.

That’s it. Your VSIX is now available for everybody to download!!

Extra benefits

When building custom schemas, you get some added benefits you might didn’t consider.

1. Snippets are automatically created to include your custom properties.

All the vendor specific snippets in VS2012 are auto-generated based on the schema files. That means that if you include -khtml-border-radius in your custom schema, that property will now be included in the regular border-radius snippet.

2. Works in LESS and SCSS too

Any editor that is built on top of the VS2012 CSS editor will get the same Intellisense for your custom schema. One such editor is the LESS editor included in Web Essentials 2012.

Happy coding!