How to turn on Visual Studio 2010 .css Intellisense on .less file
CssVisual Studio-2010Visual StudioIntellisenseCss Problem Overview
Does anyone know how to enable css intellisense in a non .css file extension? I have a .less file that is basically a .css file but visual studio will not use .css intellisense on the file.
Css Solutions
Solution 1 - Css
Try using the CSS Is Less extension for VS2010:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/dd5635b0-3c70-484f-abcb-cbdcabaa9923
Forces .LESS files to open in the CSS editor, without having to change settings or adding HTML tags to your LESS file.
Solution 2 - Css
Visual Studio allows you to map custom extensions to the different editors by going to Tools->Options->Text Editor->File Extension. You simply supply the custom extension and select the editor you wish to associate it with. Sadly, the Visual Studio team has seemed to overlook the CSS editor in the list of editors.
A possible work around is to associate the extension with the Html Editor and then type <html><head><style> in the top of the file and </style></head></html> in the bottom of the file. This will give you CSS intellisense support between the sets of tags. You can then remove the HTML tags and the file association when your done editing.
Solution 3 - Css
Another alternative is to name your files '.less.css', then change any references to them in either your master page or your main css file (the one that loads all the other css files with @import statements), then configure the less handler as follows in the 'handlers' section of your Web.Config file:
<add name="LessCssHandler" type="dotless.Core.LessCssHttpHandler,dotless.Core" path="*.LESS.CSS" verb="*" />
You then get syntax highlighting, less works fine and you've not had to set up new file extensions in vs, load any vs addins, etc, which is handy if you have a team of more than 1 developer.
If you use a single file to define colours etc, it will have to be named '.less' and imported into each .less.css file with an @import 'exampledefs.less'; statement within that file.
Solution 4 - Css
I'm really enjoying MindscapeWebWorkbench. It is a free plugin for VS 2010 to provide .less support. In addition the extension came with .Sass and Coffee script support!
Give a try!
Ahh, Hanselman approves ;)
Solution 5 - Css
Late answer, but this is a hackish way to solve it in "pure" VS2010
#if DEBUG
<html><head><style>
#endif
in the top of the file and
#if DEBUG
</style></head></html>
#endif
in the bottom of the file
Solution 6 - Css
This extension provides full Intellisense
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/e646c6ec-87a7-45ea-81e8-d655a3d3e73e
Solution 7 - Css
I highly recommend using Crunch: http://crunchapp.net/
Visual Studio (Express included) allows you to open Less files with Crunch. True it doesn't open them in Visual Studio, it opens Crunch to edit the file, but there are many reasons to use Crunch anyways. The biggest reason is that Crunch will take your Less code and compile to a pure CSS file. The benefits are that you don't need to include the less.js script in your website, which avoids extra overhead, you can write Less code, and it's as simple as double-clicking your less file in VS, editing the file, then "crunching" (or saving) it over your CSS stylesheet. No need to touch the pure CSS generated by crunch.
Solution 8 - Css
Nobody has mentioned Web Essentials 2012:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/07d54d12-7133-4e15-becb-6f451ea3bea6
Solution 9 - Css
I had to make add a MIME-type to my IIS server like this:
Extension: .less
MIME type: text/css