JavaScript tools for Visual Studio 2005

Question

I need to find if there are any tools targeting both Visual Studio 2005 and JavaScript. I'm interested in plugins which will increase the quality of work done in VS2005 with JavaScript oriented development.

Answer 1

If you could afford it, I'll recommend upgrading to Visual Studio 2008. You can open .NET 2.0 application without converting them. It comes with much better Javascript Intellisense.

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One of the other JavaScript features in VS 2008 is the much-improved support for JavaScript debugging.

These features are enabled in both the free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition as well as in Visual Studio, and makes using JavaScript and building AJAX applications significantly easier.

If you are using jQuery in your applications, then you could install jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008.

Answer 2

Well, if you want something that will help you write better Javascript in Visual Studio then you can give JSLint a try. It's a plugin that will verify your Javascript code, spot errors, and help you debug it.

Beware, JSLint can hurt feelings.

Answer 3

I think you'll be hard pressed to find anything specific for VS2005, since it is a dev environment and JS is a client technology. However, a couple of ideas you might want to consider:

1. jQuery. The recent availability of Intellisense for jQuery (although I think it is only for VS2008) helps your quality of work in the sense that you don't have to spend so much time looking back and forth at documentation, although I would say that is the best way to really become familiar with it anyway. There are several other good JS libraries out there, but (a) I don't think that was the point of your question, and (b) jQuery is the only one "semi-officially" supported in VS that I'm aware of.
2. Script#. Although I haven't used it, it looks interesting... basically you program in C#, and it gets translated to JS at runtime.