Recently, a lot of people have asked for Intellisense support for AngularJS in the Visual Studio HTML editor. The bad news is that there is no extensibility for providing additional HTML attribute Intellisense, so I can’t ship this support in Web Essentials.

The good news is that we can accomplish this through a more manual mechanism.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1

Find the file commonHTML5Types.xsd located in the Visual Studio install directory and back it up (just in case). Mine is here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html

Step 2

Download this new version of commonHTML5Types.xsd and replace the existing one from the directory in Step 1 with it.

Step 3

Restart Visual Studio and that's it. You now have all the ng-* attributes available in Intellisense. This Works On My Machine^tm, so please let me know if it works on yours too.

I still want to add native support in either Visual Studio or Web Essentials, so if this is something you’re interested in, please vote for it here.

Today the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update was released. Go download it right now!

It contains a lot of new and updated Visual Studio tooling features including:

• First class LESS editor
• Knockout.js Intellisense
• Paste JSON as classes
• CoffeeScript editor
• Mustache/Handlebars/JsRender syntax highlighting
• Page Inspector
  • Live CSS auto-sync as you type
  • JavaScript selection mapping and callstack

Some of them are features that started their lives in Web Essentials 2012 and are now ported into an official release. Every time we move features from the experimental Web Essentials extension into the official product, we try to make the transition as smooth as possible.

However, this time we moved some substantial features that are mutually exclusive – they register the same MEF components and that leads to this rather ugly exception:

This exception occurs when Web Tools 2012.2 is installed and you haven’t updated Web Essentials to version 2.5. The solution is simply to update Web Essentials. Go do that now. If you don’t have Web Essentials installed at all, you won’t get this error because then there is no conflict.