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.