The Issue

I have been banging my head against a brick wall over the last few days trying to get JavaScript & JQuery Intellisense working in Visual Studio 2010 for a web project I am currently working on. I have read all the threads over at StackOverflow, I have read many of the threads on MSDN’s discussion forums and on many pages around the web.

All to no avail – as you can see above, no matter what I did, I could not get any JQuery Intellisense. But why? While it’s not perfect, Visual Studio 2010 has some pretty good (and rapidly improving) Javascript Intellisense support. I know this because I’ve used it on many projects in the past. But for some reason, it was just not working in this current project.

The Problem

I hunted high and low:

• I made sure I had the JavaScript sources local to the project (to rule-out CDN/connectivity issues)
• I checked that I was referencing the correct version of JavaScript
• I added “///<references path=”Scripts/JQuery-1.6.4.js" to my source
• I checked that there were no errors being reported in any of the sources

Nada. Nothing. It should work, but it wasn’t

I thought I’d check in case there were any JQuery updates published to NuGet, so I opened up the NuGet Package Manager console window in VS and typed the following:

PM> update-package

I was surprised to see a number of errors returned, including:

Update-Package : 'jQuery' was not installed in any project. Update failed.
...
Update-Package : 'jQuery.vsdoc' was not installed in any project. Update failed.
...

Huh? That’s odd. Let’s see what packages we have installed:

PM> get-package

Id                             Version      
--                             -------      
dotless                        1.2.1.0      
EntityFramework                4.1.10331.0  
EntityFramework                4.1.10715.0  
jQuery                         1.6.2        
jQuery                         1.6.4        
jQuery.UI.Combined             1.8.16       
jQuery.Validation              1.8.1        
jQuery.vsdoc                   1.6          

To quote Chris Griffin: ”WHAAAAAAAAAT?” Two versions of JQuery? SRSLY?

The Remedy

I remembered that just a couple of weeks ago, I’d updated my NuGet packages and noticed that a new version of JQuery had been downloaded, the old version appeared to be removed from my project and replaced with JQuery-1.6.4. I thought it had been done right, but I guess something must have gotten screwed up in the upgrade.

So, I used "uninstall-package …" several times for each JQuery library until all references to JQuery were removed. Then I used "install-package JQuery” to re-add the latest JQuery to my project. I ran “Rebuild” to re-generate the JavaScript Intellisense, and was delighted to see JQuery Intellisense restored to its full working glory:

WOOHOOOO!

I hope this post helps anyone else out there who’s been struggling to get JavaScript Intellisense working in VS 2010.

As of 21:00 PST (9:00pm PST), Internet Explorer 9 is now available for you to download and enjoy.

Over the last year, Microsoft has been releasing previews of some of the features destined for its next browser release, Internet Explorer 9. In September 2010 Microsoft then released a fully usable beta followed in February 2011 by a near-final “Release Candidate”.

Tonight’s release of IE9 marks Microsoft’s return as a true competitor in the browser marketplace – something that many thought would never happen. And not only has Microsoft released a truly competitive browser, but they’ve actually leapfrogged Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Opera’s browsers.More...

It’s gotta be Google’s Chrome, right?

Wrong.

Okay, so it must be Mozilla’s Firefox?

Nope!

Ooh ooh, I know, Apple’s Safari – yayyyyy … Apple FTW!

Nuh huh! Wrong again.

Erm … Opera?

Nope.

I give up. Who is it?

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9!!

[cue sound of chins hitting the floor echoing all across the internet!]

The W3C publishes the latest HTML5 test results across the most prevalent browsers. Top of the stack right now is IE9. Of course, the browser at the top of the stack is likely to change over time the browser vendors continue to improve their browsers and (hopefully) converge on 100% test coverage and compliance.

But what these results show VERY clearly is that Microsoft is absolutely dead serious about its commitment to making IE9 the premier web browser for Windows.

Long gone are the days of browser vendor lock-in. Today’s web browser market is all about nose-to-nose open and direct competition with one another and rigid compliance to published and developing standards.

We’re about to enter a whole new era of web development. Not only will browser compatibility issues largely cease to be an issue, but we’ll have at our disposal the kinds of markup, scripting and support features that we’d only have been able to dream of just 5-6 years ago.

Today’s facepalm, brought to you by Microsoft:

We all know that supporting future technologies can be costly in terms of time and resources. Why spend the money, time and energy modifying your application, site, etc. to support every new whizz-bang OS, app, platform or browser – I mean, it’s not as if THAT many people adopt this cutting-edge technology, right?

Imagine that you run one of the world’s largest computer software companies that creates and sells the world’s leading operating system, world’s leading browser and that you also offered some pretty cutting-edge services that you offer to customers to buy online using your own browser, amongst others.

Now imagine that your company was spending HUGE amounts of time, energy and money to built a next-generation browser that is likely to not only stem your browser's increasingly rapid decline in browser share, but actually reversed it AND set the pace that the rest of the browser vendors now have to follow. That’d be pretty good news, right?

Because this is such a big deal to your company, you’ve just launched Beta1 of said browser after a well-executed tech preview program. These efforts combined have generated ENORMOUS interest from almost everyone in the web development community. So much so in fact, that your browser has been downloaded 6 million times in two weeks – that’s more than the number of iPads that Apple sold in an it’s entire first quarter since launch, and your browsr isn’t even done yet!!

Someone in your company has earned his/her bonus this year

However, someone else shouldn’t be getting a bonus this year!

Who do you suppose is the primary customer for your whizzy new cloud services platform? Web developers, right? Yep. Absolutely. Those same web developers who are flocking to download the beta of your spanky new browser. So imagine what it looks like when those developers turn up to purchase a new account only to find that they cannot do so using your new browser because they see an error like this:

Embarrassed? YOU SHOULD BE!

And your embarrassment should be amplified 100-fold when you come to learn that said customers have to use a browser from one of your major competitors who are seeking to put you out of business in order to buy your cloud services.

What would you do to the (ir)responsible party who tarnished your company’s hard work and effort by being so unprofessional and ineffective? Suggest appropriate actions in feedback comments below!

Internet Explorer 9 Beta1 has just been released for download

To summarize: WOW!

Performance & standards

IE9 is quick. Not just a bit quicker than IE7/8. I mean “Holy cow, Batman, you just shredded the tires on the Batmobile” quick. It is as quick as IE7 is not.

I’ve been testing the tech previews of the new IE9 rendering and Javascript engines for a while now and have been much impressed with the sheer raw speed, quality, stability and power.

IE7 and IE8 were both good releases that focused on users’ safety and security, stability, but they only made minor improvements to IE’s performance and standards compliance. And all the while, Firefox, Chrome and Safari continued to make rapid progress in making their browsers markedly faster and more standards compliant.

However, it looks like with Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft might not just have caught up with the competition, but it might actually leapfrog them!

I’ve been testing the tech previews of the new IE9 rendering and Javascript engines for a while now. I have been mightily impressed with how jaw-droppingly quick IE9’s rendering is. But perhaps even more important is IE9’s enormous improvements in standards compliance. Make no mistake – not only is IE9 now blindingly fast, but it is now a leader in support of web standards.

But a tech preview of the rendering & script execution capabilities of a new browser are only part of the story: The browser’s user interface and features are just as important.

As Ed Bott said – I’ll leave it to others with the time and tools to generate the inevitable perf comparisons, but I can honestly state that IE9’s performance surprised me - in my testing, IE9 is easily as fast as Chrome and markedly faster than Chrome, Firefox or Safari on graphically-intensive sites.

Less is more - the new IE9 User Experience

Let’s face it, IE has been looking a little tired and dated ever since Google out-Apple’d Apple and released Chrome with its minimalistic … well … “chrome”. Out went the toolbars, search boxes and UI gadgets and in came the single combined address & search box:

Here’s IE9: You have to squint to see the difference between Google (above) and IE9 (below)!

I love the fact that Microsoft appear to be following Google’s lead and reducing the IE shell to the minimum “chrome” necessary for most users. Many of IE’s traditional features are still there if you want to turn them on, but Microsoft is opting for simplicity and cleanliness by default.

Features

IE9 is also littered with a number of important features that I encourage you to explore:

Tear-off Tabs

Navigate to a page. Any page. Now open another page in a different tab. Now open a new tab, go to YouTube and play a video. Decide that you want to watch the video while you’re reading one of your other pages.

Now click the YouTube tab and drag it off to a different portion of your screen (or different screen if you have more than one monitor). Notice that your page drags smoothly, the video continues uninterrupted and doesn’t miss a beat.

Zoom

It still amazes me how few people know how to do this: Open a page. Any page. Now press and hold your CTRL key while you scroll your mouse wheel backwards and forwards. Notice that your page zooms smoothly in and out, all elements remain where they should be. All text renders properly …

… even when you zoom all the way in:

Look at how clean that text is even zoomed in THAT far!

Aside: Hey, Amazon, you DO know that you don’t need to use bitmaps for your headings, right? I mean, the <hn> tags are there for a reason, render more cleanly and require less bandwidth for you and your customers. Just sayin’

Internet Explorer 8 introduced full-page zoom, but it didn’t work as well as this, many controls didn’t render properly when you zoomed in, etc. It’s flawless in IE9

Site Pinning

Storing and managing browser Favorites can be a real pain. Over time you just end up collecting a huge catalog of links which, if you’re anything like me, you often forget about and rarely use. I tend to use a small number of sites very frequently. Wouldn’t it be great if you could pin your favorite sites to your Task Bar? Now you can:

Open a page. Click and drag the page’s icon in the left of the address bar …

… and drop it into your taskbar:

Now your pinned website will appear in its own icon on your taskbar …

… and IE9 will reopen your new pinned web page in its own IE9 browser window color coded to the primary color of your pinned site’s icon – red in this case:

If you’re a site owner, you can add metadata to your site that IE9 uses to not only name your site and its hover-over tooltip, but also provides you a way to specify any number of site-specific “tasks” that appear as shortcuts in your pinned site’s context window (right click on your pinned site):

 

Further Reading

If you’d like to delve further, I can recommend reading the following:

User Experiences: Site-Centric Browsing on Windows

IE9’s Page Content Hardware Acceleration

Putting sites at the center of the browsing experience

For some great in-depth reviews of IE9, go see what Ed Bott @ ZDNet, Joanna Stern @ Engadget and Paul Thurrott have to say about IE9 Beta1.

This is only Beta1. Can’t wait to see how

Post Feedback

Post feedback on what you think of IE9 so far. Do you like it? Do you think MS have simplified IE9 too much? Is IE9 fast enough for you? If not – where is IE9 too slow?