Simplify js and css development with Web Essentials (Visual Studio Extension)

If you develop much javascript and css, this is the exension to Visual Studio you just can’t live without: Web Essentials (It is even released for VS2012). You can do many things with it. Here are two examples for simple but very useful functions: 1. Show which browsers support a css attribute: 2. Collapse javascript functions and create #region areas like in C# code: There is much more, like less and coffeescript parsing. Just check the documentation. And it is fully appliable in SharePoint development.

Less and Coffeescript

Now using less and coffeescript (update: and typescript) can be really easy even in SharePoint. Whenever you save a .less file or .coffeescript, it will create a corresponding file with .css or .js file extensions in the same folder. So you can write your styles in less and scripts in coffeescript and reference the auto-generated css and js files. UPDATE: For some reason the css is not generated when I run Visual Studio 2012 on Server 2008 with Web Essentials, but it works fine on my Windows 8 machine. To play around with less, you can use this demo site (creds to @irishbuzz on so).   Next: Typescript and SharePoint

• Css
• Extension
• Javascript
• Less
• Sharepoint
• Visual Studio
• Web Essentials