Visual Web Developer 2008 Beta2 got announced some days back. Lots of authoring enhancement has been made to this release so far as JScript is considered. Sameer already blogged about much better intellisense support in this release. I would like to point out that we also had a brand new support for Syntax Checking with this release. Syntax Checking is a very helpful feature and helps a JScript developer to find out the errors/warnings in his code at design time. The goal was to make life of a JScript developer a lot easier. We feel this is going to make a very good impact on the developers.

Let's say while writing the code I defined a variable twice. Isn't it cool the editor catching up the mistake for me? This is exactly what happens. Look at the snapshot below:

As one can see the moment the user makes a mistake, squiggles are shown and on taking the mouse over the squiggle the error/warning is displayed. User is saved from all the hassles of actually running the code to find out all the annoying errors/warnings. All the errors/warnings get listed down even in the error window as shown below:

This gives a detailed error/warning message and double clicking actually takes you to the line number. 

Some of the other facts I would like to list are:

• A syntax error or warning does not stop other authoring features like syntax coloring and intellisense to stop working. The parser used is a recovery parser which throws off/ignores bad tokens and continue giving authoring support.
• This only catches the error/warning detectable by parser. A runtime error will not be detected by this and you will get the error running the application.
• The syntax checking is also available in the stand alone JScript file added to your web project.
• This feature is also available in the Express edition of Visual Web Developer 2008.

So go ahead and start using the new Beta2 available and give your feedback to us.

Don Raman

Senior Test Lead