Sorry about the frequent updates recently. We integrated a crash reporter and have fixed a bunch of issues (many are fairly weird Visual Studio internal issues we're working around that we can't easily explain beyond 'stability improvements').
We'll be slowing down the update cycle as we have had a few people raise issues with this!
I hope that helps & thanks so much for your feedback!
Sorry about the frequent updates recently. We integrated a crash reporter and have fixed a bunch of issues (many are fairly weird Visual Studio internal issues we're working around that we can't easily explain beyond 'stability improvements').
I'm glad you're not a user who has experienced some of the issues though! We are slowing down the update cycle as we've squashed all the issues that were reported.
Back to new feature development! :-)
I hope that helps & thanks so much for your feedback!
Hello, I find that plugin through some lectures. But I have a problem with it. I add a .scss file but when I save it, .css isn't created. What is wrong?
WB does work in many ways and fails to work in some:
Works: -- Intellisense is great! Works with included files -- Coloring is great! It's not the best, but it's visually different from standard stylesheets -- Formatting is untouched! I really hate when an IDE tries to arrange my code the way it thinks and WB does not -- Warnings are great -- In fact trivial features are great :)
But non trivial are not so great...
Does not work: -- Renaming both Source and dependent file -- WB along side WebEssentials -- Parsing time depends on the total count of existing scss files in the project (n*100+, n>5), rather than complexity of the file -- body{color:red} with no imports parses in like 5 seconds -- Huge files parse in more than 30 seconds each -- space in brackets --> I prefer @include mixin( $params ) <-- notice space. Highlighting breaks
In addition, there is not enough help on the advanced settings fields.
Great tool, once it is setup. But the lack of "select/deselect" all on the workbench settings make it really painful to setup. Once it is setup it works ok, but opening a project with Bootstrap twitter less files that inherits and only require one file to convert and minify is very cumbersome to deselect check marks on every row.
We're overdue for redesigning the whole settings UI since it's grown a bit all over the show as we've added features. We're looking at doing a redesign of that whole screen in early 2013 so keep your eyes open for a release that makes things better.
as of the release dated 10/4/2012 many of the issues mentioned in this seems to go away. However I do have VS 2010 and VS 2012 installed. BTB: I used it in VS 2012 and works good on a small sample file. I don't mind the popup ad text that can be minimized.
The following are some of the improvements still pending: Control+Space still not working and it appears that it is not pulling the stylesheet lookup properties, instead asp.net properties, hence if I use font it shows only 9 properties starting with font instead of the 18 properties in a css file.
DOUBLE EDIT: Do you guys have any plans to include CSS class and ID to intellisense?
TRIPLE EDIT. I guess I can't write a new comment, so I'll just keep tacking on to the end of this one..... OH NO!! I just upgraded to VS2012 (Boss made me, I didn't really want to...) And now every time I drop a colon after an attribute in my LESS file, VS crashes completely! The debugger told me the following: There was an unhandled XamlParseException, Could not find a part of the path 'C:\Mindscape.WebWorkbench.Integration.10;component\Images\Member.png'.
It seems that when the intellisense is triggered, it throws a remarkably fatal exception. Am I the only one with this problem?
So it seems that this only happens when Mindscape is installed for both 2010 AND 2012. I put it just on 2012 and now it works. Hope I don't have to go back to 2010 anytime soon!
Good product, a little disappointed with some of the free version limitations. As a developer of course I understand the need to make a living from your work and am not at all offended by an upgrade option, and not even by the small ad placed in the editor. The compilation and minification are solid features that seem appropriate for a paid version, but some basic editor workflow actions like format document and comment/uncomment selection IMO are an unnecessary annoyance to exclude from the free version.
If there's anything in particular about it being fully featured please let us know. Since we're already running it in there it shouldn't be a big jump to make it more available to you :-)
Hi MysticMan, Thanks for the rating and your feedback. Would love for you to ping us at support@mindscape.co.nz so we can help iron out your speed issues. We've undertaken a lot of work in recent builds to improve performance so perhaps there's something specific to your setup that we could fix for you? Hope to hear from you!
Great extension; it would be great however if there was the ability to call up the intellisense for CSS rules by CTRL+Space. It currently just creates a space. Also, it seems as though it doesn't always apply color-coding to the text.
Pretty good. It doesn't seem to follow imports in less files in order to provide intellisense on mixins. Maybe this is a pro feature, but I didn't see it listed. Also, the VS2012 file icons should be changed to fit with the VS2012 style - the orange icon for .less files really stands out.
Sadly it doesn't work with Express. This is because Microsoft does not allow for extensions in the Express edition (it's a limitation of the Express version - not something we have any say over).
We'd love to have it work with the Express version but we can't sorry.
Hello,
I use you tool mainly with twitter bootstrap but the latest less files are written in less 1.3 and they give errors. Will there be an update so the less files will work when written in less 1.3 style.
Greetings
Hi, I love this plugin. Thank you.
However I have a bunch of sass libraries (eg mixins) that i partial import into my main sass file. According to sass documentation for partial imports (Read link below under heading "Partials") naming a file beginning with an underscore eg _mixins.scss should NOT generate a .css file. It seems your plugin does not conform to this rule and for me is problematic. Any chance of a fix?
http://sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#import
Hi Byron,
Thanks for drawing this to our attention. It's not in the latest build but we'll add the ability to default to not generating the output for partials in a future release. At the moment, go to the 'Mindscape' menu item and go into the 'Web Workbench Options' and turn off 'compile' for the partials you have in your solution.
Thanks again for the pointer!
I have various style sheets I would like to minify and combine into one, either on build or on save. Does the Pro version support this? If so, I'm buying. :)
Hi ElmerX,
At the moment there is no way to do this, however we're just finishing off a fairly major re-architecture that should allow us to this type of thing (previously we used a SingleFileGenerator which, as the name suggests, runs per file and didn't give us the scope to do cool multi-file operations easily). Initial goal is feature parity so those current users get a seamless change. Following that we'll be adding all sorts of cool features like this to now that our underlying architecture can support it. We'll have the re-architected version out in the next week or so for testing and then within a couple of weeks following that I'd hope we can support your scenario. I'll post an update here once we support this.
Thanks for the feedback!
I'm using the web workbench mostly for .less syntax highlighting.
The .less to css generating process is done by another tool I'm using called SquishIt.
Since your last update I noticed web workbench is also creating a <name>.css1.css file (if the .less file is called <name>.css.less), with the following content:
/* Less compilation is not available in the free edition of Web Workbench. Visit http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/web-workbench to learn more */
Problem is; these files will also get deployed to our servers, which really is unnecessary and it's messing up our projects.
Is it possible to turn this 'feature' off? For me it's really annoying enough to stop using the web workbench tool... :-(
Hi,
This should be resolved in the latest build however if the .less file was made PRIOR to the latest build it will still be an issue. You can remove the "CustomTool" property value in the properties pane for the .less file. Then delete the .less.css file that is generated and it should not be re-generated on save going forward. I hope that helps.
Hey guys, I just installed on VS Ultimate 2010 and the templates doesn't appear on the list to add new files. Also, the css files for sass aren't being compiled :/
Hi Saulo,
Does this forum discussion help with what might be going wrong? http://www.mindscapehq.com/forums/thread/4839 If it doesn't, please post on there and we'll help you out :-)
I'm having difficulties with the intellisense for .less files.
Intellisense works fine with properties, words like margin, padding, background etc.
But for values it doesn't work correct.
So when I type "overflow: hid" I'd expect intellisense would offer me the "hidden" value, but it doesn't show a value at all.
Take a look at the screenshot: http://i52.tinypic.com/f9hxle.png
Thanks for the feedback. We're working on improving intellisense at the moment. Keep an eye out for the next couple of updates to resolve some of these issues.
This is a great product and I love that it keeps T4MVC files up to date. But, when you are working with a project that is checked into source control (like Team Foundation Server), it tries to update the files without checking them out first, resulting in an error. It would be great if that behavior could be corrected.
@Calvin No it doesn't appear to - "Note: Web Workbench doesn't support the old SASS syntax, only the new SCSS syntax."
http://www.mindscapehq.com/products/web-workbench/getting-started
