Every .NET developer should be very familiar with Visual Studio as their development environment. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could use it for all of your Backbase XML editing including its IntelliSense features? This article shows you how to do this.

Prerequisites and Intended Audience

This article is intended for anyone interested in Backbase Client Framework code-completion for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or higher.

Intellisense in the XML Editor

With the release of Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft finally included a real XML editor. One of its best features is the possibility to add new XML Schema files that it will use for IntelliSense code-completion. The Backbase Client Framework comes with all the XML Schemas that you will need inside the documentation\schemas folder.

To use these in Visual Studio, all you need to do is copy the .xsd files in the schemas folder to %InstallRoot%\xml\schemas. If you used the default installation directory, this will be C:\Program Files\Visual Studio 9.0\xml\schemas for Visual Studio 2008. Now restart Visual Studio and you are good to go!

With Backbase, there is one more thing we have to change. Microsoft included the standard schema for XHTML 1.1 with Visual Studio. However, according to the standard, you cannot nest non-XHTML 1.1 tags inside XHTML tags, but this is exactly what you need for Backbase. To solve this, Backbase included a modified version of the XHTML schema in the documentation\schemas folder that allows this nesting. Replace the original xhtml.xsd file with the xhtml.xsd schema modified by Backbase and it will work.

IntelliSense in the ASP/HTML Editor

Unfortunately, the ASP editor in Visual Studio is not based on the XML editor, since it is mixing XML (HTML) with code. Even though it can load some schemas and use it for HTML validation (located in %InstallRoot%\Common7\Packages\schemas), its support is limited and its behavior is even hard-coded to some extent.

At this time, it does not seem possible to get proper Backbase IntelliSense in this editor. The Microsoft developer responsible for this editor posted a small article on his weblog about the (limited) customization possibilities. If you are interested, you can read this article.