Open a file in Visual Studio's CSS Source Editor

Question

I am using Phil Haack\'s T4CSS T4 template based on .less

One bad thing about Phil\'s solution is that visual studio opens the .less files as plain text files rather

Answer 1

If you are using the dotless.Compiler.exe tool (as opposed to the http handler), there is nothing to say your files have to end with .less. I name my suffix my .less files with .css so that Visual Studio treats them like css files. E.g. my naming convention is:

/css/common.less.css ==> /css/common.css

I run the dotLess compiler as a post-build event, e.g.

$(SolutionDir)\packages\dotless.1.1.0\Tools\dotless.Compiler.exe "$(ProjectDir)\css\common.less.css" "$(ProjectDir)\css\common.css"

Answer 2

How to turn on Visual Studio 2010 .css Intellisense on .less file

Answer 3

Midscape's Web Workbench Visual Studio Extension adds support for .less files, including syntax highlighting and Intellisense. It also adds support for SASS and CoffeeScript.

Answer 4

I just posted an extension that does this; you can download it from the Visual Studio Gallery.

The key to the extension is the .pkgdef file:

[$RootKey$\Languages\File Extensions\.less]
@="{A764E898-518D-11d2-9A89-00C04F79EFC3}"

[$RootKey$\Editors\{A764E89A-518D-11d2-9A89-00C04F79EFC3}\Extensions]
"less"=dword:00000028

Note that this extension doesn't do anything to help the CSS language service support Less; nested rules, for example, don't work very well at all (it confuses the CSS language service).