Why does Visual Studio not resolve my CSS class names?

Question

Whenever I am working in Visual Studio I always found that it will not resolve the css class names in my html. The CSS Class names will appear with the green squiggly line in Visual Studio but then the page will render fine when viewing it in the browser. So I know the css file is referenced correctly in my master page but Visual Studio is just failing to resolve it. Also the Design View will not show any of the css styles either.

Answer 1

Tried to just close the project and open it again? It might be that it's just a bit slow, or you're using some sort of path to the stylesheet (generated on basis of other data or whatever) that can't be read directly by VS.

Never experienced the same (VS08).

Answer 2

See this post by Jeff King about getting Visual Studio to be able to find the javascript file with the intellisense: JScript IntelliSense FAQ.

In particular read point #4, third bullet:

Site-Relative Paths - These are paths of the form "/folder/file", and is calculated from the base of your site (http://site/application/folder/file). This approach is supported by ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. However, it is not supported by Visual Studio. The reason is because Visual Studio does not always know the final deployed location of your site and thus the path resolution cannot be guaranteed. Given that quite we've seen few folks are using site-relative paths, we could consider making an assumption just resolving this type of path to the root of the project. Given the risk that you may think your site is working when it's really not, I wanted to see how many people were supportive of this.

Notice the “[Site-Relative Paths are] NOT supported by Visual Studio”. I always use site relative paths for my javascript and css files so the solution to get Visual Studio to find your javascript files is the same solution to get Visual Studio to find your css files:

<link href="/content/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<% if (false) {%>
    <link href="../../content/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<% } %>

And now Visual Studio can find the CSS file and validate my CSS Class names exist (and Design View looks so much better too).

Posted on my blog here: Why does Visual Studio not resolve my CSS class names?

-Jeff