Some folks on the Visual Studio team have done a phenomenal job of enhancing IntelliSense for JavaScript in Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. So far, I have found numerous articles and videos that discuss how it significantly improves the development experience in ASP.NET, but I wanted to share the impact it has on what I do—Firefox add-ons.

If you’re not familiar with the architecture of Firefox add-ons, here’s an extremely abridged top-down view:

• Most add-ons are implemented with a combination of XUL (XML User Interface Language) for the UI and JavaScript to support it.
• Instead of running the context of a web page, the JavaScript runs in the context of a window.
• In order to share state across multiple windows, you must use and/or implement XPCOM components.

XPCOM components provide services or objects that JavaScript running in a Firefox web page normally does not have privileges for. For example, there are services for file I/O, preference reading and writing, and writing to Firefox’s JavaScript console. You can also build your own XPCOM components (in JavaScript, C++, among other languages) that enable you to share data across the entire Firefox session or place logic that doesn’t fit well within the context of a single window.

My use of IDEs for add-ons shifted from Notepad++ to Visual Studio in early 2007 because I needed a better way to organize and search my files, but now I am glad I made the switch for other reasons. The hard about using XPCOM is that unless you have memorized your own interfaces as well as the interfaces of all the components you use, you often find yourself referring back to your IDL files or Mozilla’s documentation for the exact name of the attributes and functions you need. This arguably slows your momentum when working with XPCOM. But with the new improvements to Visual Studio’s JavaScript IntelliSense, this problem (almost) fades away completely.

Consider the following XPCOM interface:

Creating an XPCOM component requires an interface specified in XPIDL (shown above) as well as an implementation (not important for this discussion). The interface above should be straightforward to interpret even if you are not familiar with XPIDL. The example shows a simple tracing interface which abstracts away the API pain points of logging data to Firefox’s JavaScript console. It inherits from nsISupports (the XPCOM equivalent of IUnknown), and its methods take very simple parameters. The scriptable attribute specifies that this interface is callable from JavaScript and hence usable in our add-on. Here’s some sample code to show from JavaScript how we can invoke this interface.

The indexer on Components.classes returns the object that follows the given contract ID. The contract ID is defined in the implementation (and we hope the documentation); from there we get the service that corresponds to the ITrace interface (this is like a QueryInterface call) and call the error function with the exception that we caught. Of course, there is zero IntelliSense help because Visual Studio doesn’t know what Components.classes and Components.interfaces are, nor would it have any idea how to find the XPIDL file for a given service to find what functions ITrace actually exposes. We can do much, much better.

Let’s expose a simple function called "error" that we can include from any other JavaScript file that allows us to do the same thing:

Great! Now we have a utility function, we can replace our ugly code before:

Still, though, no love from IntelliSense:

Here we can use the the reference tag in our JS file to enable Intellisense, like this:

Very nice! If we flesh out this xpcom-interop file more, our development time can really improve.

Something you need to be aware of is that sometimes the XPCOM interop file can become too complicated for Visual Studio to parse correctly because it references objects that it might not know exist (e.g. Components.classes, Components.interfaces, Components.results). If this is the case, add an xxx.debug.js file in the same directory as the xxx.js file and write all of your documentation there. For example, I could keep xpcom-interop.js like this:

(Note that because we reference Components.classes outside of the logError function we see this when updating IntelliSense (Ctrl+Shift+J).)

And I could also create a new xpcom-interop.debug.js file for documentation purposes:

Notice that I don’t include any code for the logError function this time. This file is intended for documentation purposes only; it will never be included with the final Firefox add-on because it doesn’t do anything. If you go back to the default.js file and refresh IntelliSense (Ctrl+Shift+J), IntelliSense will display the same help for the logError function in addition to displaying the prefService variable. When you place the reference tag at the top of a file, Visual Studio will look for filename.debug.js before checking the actual file that the tag references, which is very useful in these situations.

Ctrl+Shift+J Is Your Friend!

Fiddling with JS IntelliSense can be frustrating if you’re not aware of how to get it to refresh itself. Ctrl+Shift+J should work. If not, you can find it in the Edit menu under the IntelliSense menu item. Also, you can bind a shortcut to the command "Edit.UpdateJScriptIntelliSense".

Resources

1. Format for JavaScript Doc Comments
2. Hotfix to Enable -vsdoc JS files