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.
tl;dr
You need to update Web Essentials 2013 to version 2.2. If not, Visual Studio will crash. Download now.
Before Visual Studio 2013 Update 3
The upcoming release of Visual Studio Update 3 has API changes in some of the components that Web Essentials is extending. Those changes are not compatible with the current version of Web Essentials and will cause VS to crash after upgrading to Update 3. To be fair, those APIs were never public to begin with, so I was taking a chance when I was using them in Web Essentials.
If you are currently using Web Essentials 2.1 for Visual Studio Update 2, you should see this dialog show up the next time you open Visual Studio.
This is the first time this notification feature has been used after introducing it in Web Essentials 2.1. Good thing we did.
It’s important that you install this update immediately. You don’t have to restart Visual Studio – it’s enough that you just install the update. If not, you might forget to do it before you install Visual Studio Update 3. So go do it now.
It turns out to be good timing, since we have added some cool new features in version 2.2. Here’s a list of a few of them:
This is unfortunately the price we have to pay to be on the cutting edge. Lesson learned and we’ll do our best to make sure this doesn’t happen again. It’s not a guarantee since Web Essentials will continue to use APIs that are unsupported by Microsoft. That’s the only way we can add all those cutting edge features.
Download Web Essentials 2.2
