As Visual Studio “14” continues its development, the recently released 4th preview offers a glimpse at some of the web-centric development efforts being worked on. While none seem to be earthshaking on an individual basis, taken as a whole they offer evolutionary improvements that improve the daily quality of life in the editor.
Editing JSON files in the editor benefits from improved performance through asynchronous JSON schema loading, caching schemas, better IntelliSense, and JSON schema validation. Loaded schemas are stored between Visual Studio sessions, saving from having to re-download them every access. Should it be necessary to force a reload, the “Reload Schemas” context menu (or CTRL+SHIFT+J) will reload them.
Through the use of editor enhancements, ability to minify or un-minify JSON data in a file. For example, start with some existing JSON data:
After selecing Un-minify:
The HTML editing benefits from the usual bug fixes and updated IntelliSense, but the biggest improvement for many developers will be regarding how double-curly braces {{ }} are handled. In particular the content within the double-braces is ignored so templating frameworks like Angular and Handlebars will work with much less frustration. Similarly, the editor will no longer try to validate unknown attributes for custom elements, reducing the number of perceived errors (marked with the familiar red line squiggles) when the editor is faced with unrecognized elements.
HTML elements now get tooltips for those elements that are recognized by the editor:
#region support added to support code folding in the editor. Sample code collapsed:
Which then can be expanded:
Similary, comments can (<--- --->) can be marked up with keywords like Todo: or Hack: and the editor will recognize them as such, displaying them in Visual Studio's task list window.
Finally, a welcome addition to the existing Browser Link functionality is the incorporation of the CSS auto-sync, so that the browser(s) used with Visual Studio during editing sessions can display changes made to CSS files being edited. This speeds up the edit/review cycle when making changes to style sheets.