Question

I am going to outline the problem I was seeing and post the answer to the problem immediately afterwards because I’ve seen several threads discussing this issue but none that have presented the remedy I found this morning.

I am using Visual Studio 2010 to build a web project but cannot get any JQuery intellisense. I do get some basic JavaScript Intellisense, but specifically get no JQuery Intellisense.

I’ve done all the recommended troubleshooting – making sure I have JQuery locally to rule-out CDN/connectivity issues, making sure I’m referencing the correct JQuery files, etc. But to no avail – still no JQuery Intellisense 🙁

Answer 1

Here’s the solution to the issue above:

To cut a long story short, I used the NuGet Package Manager pane in VS2010 to run update-package in case something was wrong with the local JQuery package, and was surprised to find a number of errors reported:

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

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          

Notice that I appear to have multiple JQuery packages installed. This is likely confusing Visual Studio’s Javascript Intellisense engine.

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.

I then used “install-package JQuery” to re-add the latest JQuery to my project. I “Rebuilt” the project to re-generate the JavaScript Intellisense, and was delighted to see JQuery Intellisense restored to its full working glory!

This issue and its resolution is also documented on my blog:
http://www.bitcrazed.com/post/2011/10/07/How-NuGet-hosed-my-Javascript-Intellisense-but-still-saved-the-day.aspx

Hope this helps others who’re having problems getting JQuery Intellisense working in Visual Studio 2010.