When I installed Visual Studio 2010 a couple of days ago I was really disappointed to see that JavaScript Intellisense failed to work completely in the new install. No workey in .js files, or ASPX pages inside of script blocks. After some back and forth with folks on the ASPInsiders list and the product teams it looks like there is an issue somewhere with the default settings that get set when Visual Studio 2010 first installs.

This doesn’t affect all installs, but there were handful in a small group of folks, so this is likely going to hit a few of you trying out Visual Studio 2010 as well.

To get Intellisense to work again, thanks to a tip from Luis Abreu, I ended up resetting my Visual Studio settings (Tools | Import and Export Settings):

then go ahead and reset to your preferred default profile (I typically choose the C# profile over the Web profile). This may seem counter intuitive immediately after a new install since I hadn’t changed any settings yet, but the reset did the trick.

And voila, Intellisense in JavaScript is back.

I suspect this has something to do with VS 2010 importing some existing VS 2008 settings, so even if you don’t have problems in VS 2010 it might be a good idea to actually reset all settings just to make sure there’s a clean slate to start with.

Hope this helps out some of you.

Other JavaScript Editor Thoughts

One nice feature that will be quite useful is support for CodeSnippet Expansion in JavaScript, which means you can automate common tasks with keyboard expansions. Since there’s no CodeRush for VS 2010 yet and I keep typing my CR shortcuts out of habit, I guess I’m going to fix up some my more common shortcuts as code snippets (especially for ASP.NET snippets). The main reason I didn’t use Code Snippets extensively in the past is because there was no support for ASP.NET and JavaScript but now there’s much less of an excuse. While I still prefer the ease and flexibility with which you can create new shortcuts in CodeRush, the VS Code Snippet functionality is relatively nice and easy and it’s built in and easily portable to other VS installations.

jQuery support (with the –vsdoc.js extension files) is now also baked in VS 2010 – jQuery Intellisense just works out of the box and it seems that Intellisense is much more snappy. No more long delays before it works even in large script files and quicker IS pop ups while typing. The JavaScript Intellisense engine (according to release notes) has been reworked to be more flexible and supposedly faster because of it and this first quick checks seem to confirm that.

There are also some improvements in the code formatting behavior which in the past drove me batty with its inconsistent Indenting, re-indenting, outdenting etc. It appears that now the editor gets the intended behavior right most of the time – the result is the auto-format is a heck of a lot less jumpy than it used to be. In a few tests of a script heavy app I’m working on the auto-indenting with often nested jQuery code ended up working predictably and not jumpy as in 2008. Not exactly a new feature but  I’m just glad to see this working much better the way it’s supposed to.

Unfortunately the JavaScript editor’s improvements in general are rather minor. There’s still no code navigation of any kind (no function list drop down or class/function/navigator) which IMHO is the biggest shortcoming of the VS JavaScript editor. Disappointed as there was some discussion that this was a coming feature for the VS 2010 editor. Anything beyond Ctrl-F to find code inside of the JS editor would be useful.

Also Refactoring inside of JavaScript surely would be nice. At the very least renaming support is something I wish for in many occasions. Basic function extraction would be useful too as well as block optimization refactorings, but renaming really is the one I would like more than anything.

Anyway, it looks like minor improvements at this point and let’s hold out hope there may still be additional improvements by the time VS 2010 ships.