We have discovered that in a very limited number of setup scenarios of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Jscript IntelliSense and Colorization may not work property after installing the product. You will get no IntelliSense in JavaScript code, and all JavaScript code will appear black (i.e., colorization of keywords will be missing). The image below shows how the code would appear if this issue occurs:

The same issue will affect JavaScript code in your HTML and ASPX pages.

The issue is caused by the Jscript engine not being registered properly during the installation of Visual Studio. There is an easy workaround for this installation issue that will restore full functionality of Jscript IntelliSense.

To fix the problem, you will need to modify two registry values. Please be extremely careful when working with your system registry. If you are not familiar with Windows Registry and regedit tool, please ask your computer administrator to fix the issue for you.

The registry values you need to modify are

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\CLSID\{014E9A41-54E5-44ED-B15E-EFFA8758BFFC}]

“CodeBase”=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll

and

“CodeBase”=file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll

Instead of the values you see above, you very likely have values “file:///”  for both of the above registry entries if you are experiencing this issue. You need to replace those values with full path to Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll library that is installed in the Common7\IDE subdirectory of your Visual Studio installation. In the examples above, Visual Studio was installed to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0”, so the correct values for the registry entries were “file:///C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\\Common7\\IDE\\Microsoft.JScript.AuthoringServices.dll”

The following two images show the incorrect registry content. Note the circled values and registry key names:

and

The corrected values should look like the following:

and

After making these changes, full functionality of the Jscript editing in Visual Studio should be restored. Please let us know if you experience any further problems!

– Alex Gavrilov
Software Development Engineer
Web Development Tools

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.