Update Jan 16, 2015 – The newly released Visual Studio 2015 CTP 5 also supports Grunt/Gulp Intellisense using the files available in this blog post. In fact, the Intellisense will be a lot better in CTP 5 due to the support for Object Literal Intellisense in the JavaScript Editor.

I’ve spent some time figuring out how to get Intellisense working for Grunt and Gulp in the JavaScript editor. Today, I hit a breakthrough that lights up Intellisense automatically. All it requires is that you perform the following two steps:

1. Download the JavaScript Intellisense files (zip with two .js files)
2. Copy them to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\JavaScript\References

If you’ve installed Visual Studio under a different path, then you’ll have to find the correct folder at that location instead.

This trick also works in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, but then the folder to copy the JavaScript files to is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\JavaScript\References

Here’s what it looks like when editing GulpFile.js:

And here is GruntFile.js:

This is my first attempt, so please give it a try and let me know what you think. I want to try building this into Visual Studio 2015 so your feedback is super important.

Update: See this new blog post for how to apply the Intellisense to both Visual Studio 2013 and 2015

The latest release of Web Essentials 2015 provides Intellisense for GruntFile.js and GulpFile.js. For Gulp it just works out of the box, but for Grunt we have to add a little JSDoc comment to our file for Intellisense to light up.

For Grunt, just add this JSDoc comment on top of the module.export line:

/**
 * @param {Grunt} grunt
 */
module.exports = function(grunt) {…

The JSDoc comment instructs the JavaScript Intellisense engine that the grunt parameter is of type Grunt which is specified by Web Essentials.

JSDoc comments are now natively supported in Visual Studio 2015

Here’s a video showing the feature for both Gulp and Grunt.

I hope to be able to remove the requirement on the JSDoc comments, so that Intellisense will just work without you having to do anything.