I’ve been asked this question so many times lately, that a blog-post-answer seemed appropriate. There will be a Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2012!

The original Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2010 quickly became popular amongst web developers in the fall of 2011, when it was first released. Primarily, I think, because it added a lot of missing functionality to the CSS editor. It made working with CSS less painful and more fun – like it should be.

It was flawed, it was slow and it didn’t always feel very accurate. Most of these issues were fixed, but some still remain. I had to parse all the CSS manually using regular expression and other techniques and that had a lot of side effects. In fact, everything was done manually. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked for the most part.

Web Essentials for VS2010

Web Essentials for VS2012

Web Essentials for VS2012 will be different. The performance is spectacular and it feels – and  is – very accurate. The reason for this is largely due to the vast amount of feedback people submitted from the original Web Essentials. Bug reports and feature request still keeps coming in every week.

  
Intellisense for HTML tags, class names and ID’s in CSS selectors. Web Essentials 2012

All that feedback also made a huge difference in our priorities when building the brand new CSS editor in VS2012. We basically threw the old editor out after shipping VS2010 and started completely from scratch.  We didn’t do a lot of specifications, instead we prototyped a bunch of different ideas, iterated on them and finally implemented them. The time it takes to write a good spec is about the same time it takes to build a prototype, so it was a perfect way to be creative and come up with solid solutions.

The CSS experience in VS2012 is so much better than it ever was and significantly raises the bar for CSS editors in the industry, IMHO. So what role would Web Essentials play and was it even needed in VS2012 and beyond? Well, not all prototypes made it in the product. Also, not all features from the original Web Essentials made it either.

Right-click in the CSS editor to perform document-wide fixes in Web Essentials 2012.

So, I’ve been slowly porting Web Essentials, piece by piece, to Visual Studio 2012 to test the CSS editor for the past 6 months. Combine that with all the prototypes and experiments that never made it into VS and you have a good starting point for the next version of Web Essentials. Oh, and throw in a more friendly and helpful version of CssCop into the mix too.

New message types helps identify browser compatibility problems and helps with best practices

The ultimate goal of Web Essentials have always been to increase developer happiness by exceeding the expectations of what you would think possible in a CSS editor. Providing big features that really make an impact is always fun and hopefully helpful as well. Smaller features and even smaller details can have an equally big impact and I think that is the theme of the new Web Essentials – details with a big impact.

Not everything in the original Web Essentials was about CSS. It contained features for both HTML and JavaScript. However, most of those features actually made it into VS2012. That’s great, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t useful features to be added outside of CSS.

Mustache/Handlebar support in the HTML editor for JavaScript templating and data binding

This is the first post in a series about the upcoming Web Essentials 2012. Later I’ll go more into detail about the individual features (there’s a lot!) and show some code. This was a primer and an overdue answer to the question.

Web Essentials 2012 will be available when Visual Studio 2012 RTM is released.

Teaser: Check out the prototype in this Channel 9 video.

Not everybody is able to upgrade to Visual Studio 2012 RC due to company policy or other reasons, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get some of its CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 today. Whether or not you’ve got Web Standards Update installed or not, this is for you.

We’ve been able to port some of the support from Visual Studio 2012 into a format that is understood by Visual Studio 2010, but a lot of it I’ve had to port manually. Before proceeding, you should know that this is completely unsupported and at your own risk.

Here’s how to patch your installation of VS2010.

1. Download the new CSS 3 schema file

2. Locate the current CSS schema files. Mine are located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Packages\1033\schemas\CSS. If you customized your install directory, then it’s located somewhere else, but the path should be similar.

3. If you have a file called css30.xml (from Web Standards Update), then replace it with the new downloaded file. If you don’t have css30.xml, then replace css21.xml with the downloaded file. I recommend you backup the old file before overriding it – just in case.

4. Restart Visual Studio 2010.

Caveats

Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t support some of the new CSS 3 constructs and unit types. This new schema file will not help with that. It can’t. What you do get is all the standard and vendor specific properties with Intellisense and validation to the degree Visual Studio 2010 supports it.

Because a portion of this new schema was edited manually by me, it is possible that it contains a few bugs. Please report them in the comments if you find any, so I can get it fixed.