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I have Chirpy installed, which I use for LESS compilation, and I also have Web Workbench installed, which I use only for formatting of the LESS syntax, seeing as Web Workbench no longer compiles LESS into CSS. Web Workbench was causing conflicts with Chirpy, and as Web Workbench no longer compiles to CSS, I decided to stick with Chirpy instead of putting up with Web Workbench's "the free version does not compile" notifications. As I was doing this I copied the entire contents of a LESS file and deleted the version which Web Workbench was no longer working with. I created a new file, and when I went to paste in the contents from the now-deleted LESS file, I found that the amazing Web Workbench had copied it's helpful "the free Web Workbench no longer compiles LESS" message instead of my stylesheet. In other words, I've now lost the contents of an entire stylesheet thanks to this pedantic notification. I realise that it's a free utility but if you're going to encourage people to use this then some warning should be in place. The same goes for the 'upgrade' from the working version to the version which no longer compiles LESS. So now I can no longer use Web Workbench for it's very useful LESS formatting - unless there's a way to use it for formatting and turn off it's LESS compilation - I'll use something else for this. |
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Hi Awj, You can disable the LESS compilation step by clicking on your LESS file and then in the Properties for the file delete the value in the 'CustomTool' property. This will stop the Web Workbench from even trying to generate the CSS file. No free version of the Web Workbench has ever compiled LESS files -- we made sure that what started as free stayed free. We will review the notification panel. In the full edition you can close it permanently. Thank you for your feedback and I hope the note about disabling LESS compilation helps. John-Daniel Trask |
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Thanks for the prompt response, Daniel. I've now re-enabled Web Workbench. I restarted Visual Studio and then checked the Properties as you described; none of my LESS files have anything in the Custom Tool field. And now whenever I modify and save a LESS file I no longer get the notification. So I wonder if this Custom Tool field is only populated for LESS files which are created while Web Workbench is running? |
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>> So I wonder if this Custom Tool field is only populated for LESS files which are created while Web Workbench is running? Yes as the custom tool is part of the Web Workbench. John-Daniel Trask |
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Yes - the previous Freeware version was extremely valuable for SCSS and LESS editting, but becoming "Nagware" has made Web Workbench just too annoying to use. I also use the excellent Chirpy for pre-processing and minification and all my MVC projects are already dependant upon it.
I sincerely appreciated the original tool, but have had to de-install :(
I now urge Mindscape to do one of two things:
This scenario reminds me of what happened with .NET Reflector which ultimately turned into a simple bait-and-switch - an activity that only gives a bad feeling about the parent company's future intentions with all products in their portfolio.
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Thanks for your feedback jcliff29.
We never promised that the Web Workbench would remain free forever and we have in fact made sure that all the original functionality is there - unhindered and free to use. Enjoy using Chirpy -- it's a good tool for what it does however you will of course no longer get syntax highlighting, intellisense etc. If all you need is compilation and minification tools then it's good for that. Thanks again for the feedback, we're certainly listening :-) |
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I just wanted to clarify something from an earlier post of mine which relates to one of the points in your reply, John-Daniel: When I mentioned that the "pedantic notification" was getting in the way I was referrring to the comment which appears in the compiled CSS file. This notice is a CSS comment which says that LESS compilation is no longer offered in the free version. I was not referring to the box in the bottom-left of the screen which describes the full version's featureset. In both your responses now you've written that "the original featureset has remained free". Previously I was writing my LESS files and these were being compiled down to CSS. I now realise that it was Chirpy doing this as these were files which were in the project pre-Web Workbench. However, once I started including new LESS files Web Workbench took over the control of these from Chirpy and unbeknownst to me it wasn't compiling the LESS to CSS. The only way I realised this was by eventually opening one of the 'compiled' CSS files to find the "pedantic comment" stating the free version no longer compiles LESS to CSS. This text implies that it did compile LESS to CSS but that this has stopped, which contradicts what you said about the featureset being constant in the free version. So what I was asking in my original post was is there a way to turn off Web Workbench's ownership of LESS files and therefore allow Chirpy to own them and govern the creation of buddy files? You answered this by pointing out that if the CustomTool field is empty then Web Workbench relinquishes its LESS ownership, which is good to know. However, given that the free version does not compile LESS to CSS, why does the free version go halfway by creating the buddy files (which prevents any other tool such as Chirpy from governing the LESS files) and then populate them with a comment saying that this feature isn't available in the free version? What use is that? Furthermore, it makes creating files which Chirpy works with problematic. In other words, the free version of Web Workbench doesn't offer a feature, but its actions cause other tools from fulfilling this feature. I appreciate that you are not the developer of Chirpy and why should you make the effort to allow Chirpy to operate as expected, but I would point out that Web Workbench and Chirpy are not in direct competition; they can complement each other. What would be ideal is if there was a master switch where we could turn off Web Workbench's creation of these buddy files at a global level and therefore allow other tools to create and work with them, then simply use Web Workbench for the LESS formatting, syntax and intellisense which it's great for (and much-needed). I'm happy to pay the $29 for the full version, but due to what else Chirpy offers I'd prefer to continue using Chirpy for the LESS compilation and minification, and to stop Web Workbench from interfering if it's not actually going to add anything other than a CSS file with a comment saying that this feature isn't available in the free version. |
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Hi Awj, Thanks for your post. Very good point that our default free behavior makes it more difficult -- this was unintended. We'll have a chat tomorrow about how we could make this behave better in the next release (it's 10:24pm here in New Zealand). Occassionally there's aspects to VS integration that makes things problematic so I'll stop myself short of saying 'this will be fixed' before discussing it further with the development team who may give reasons it's not an easy fix, but I hope it is. I'll post an update on the thread with the outcome. I really appreciate the time you've taken to write up such detailed and constructive feedback. |
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@AWJ
These are really my sentiments exactly! Chirpy gives me all the "pre" and "post" processing I need - and it does so in a totally "transparent" way - and has done since its beta inceptions. Therefore I have NO USE for the "Pro" version of Web Workbench - Of course WW's syntax highlighting and intellisense has always been VERY welcome - and tools of this quality are rare - helping to encourage further involvement with the company - . but that "FREE" promise has been totally broken by the inclusion of NagWare to upgrade to "PRO" ..... very sad indeed - another Red-Belt in the making. $29.95 simply to remove a piece of Nagware after the very proud and alturisc initial Midsacpe announcements of this tool - when the only additions for "PRO" are trying to catch up with more established, open souce and free tools that have already beome mainstream for many developers? I REALLY DO NOT THINK SO !!! Over the years I have heard of MindScape as library and tools providers - but have never used them - but certainly in future I will be VERY WARY of their future intent. I suggest others be too. @John Daniel >> ...should be a fraction of an hours billable rate Do you know my business? Virtually 100% of my programming time now is spent supporting charitable organisations - No/little money donated == No money spent for "billable rates" == No money to spend to remove an annoying pop-up. >> We don't provide a nuget package Yes - Nuget was a mistake - I corrected that on my review at "The Gallery" >> You can minimise the pop up to a very small little name in the bottom corner. The act of Nagware minimisation and the total persitance of the nagging "very small little name" is what annoys me. Did you not realise that from my original post? |
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Hello awj, To turn off LESS compilation in Web Workbench, select the .less file in Solution Explorer, right-click and choose Properties, find the Custom Tool entry in the Properties grid, and delete the content of that entry. You'll have to do this for each new file you create (we don't have a 'master switch' for it) but it should at least make it easier to get it working alongside Chirpy or other LESS tools. |
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I appreciate the response, Ivan - John-Daniel had already mentioned this in his first post in this thread. What I went on to point out is that this makes it awkward (if not impossible) to create new files and utilise a different add-in or extension for taking care of the LESS-to-CSS compilation: if I create a new file with a .LESS extension then Web Workbench automatically takes charge of it. This is detrimental for two reasons:
Currently what I'm having to do whenever I add a new LESS file is open the Extension Manager, disable Web Workbench, restart Visual Studio, create the new LESS file and watch Chirpy create its two buddy files, open Extension Manager and enable Web Workbench, then restart Visual Studio. I hope you understand now why I'm keen to see some sort of master switch added to Web Workbench where we can stop it from taking ownership of these buddy files. Simply put, as the free version does not offer LESS-to-CSS compilation, why does it block any other tool from performing this action? And telling me that I can remove this ownership after the file has been created is not the answer. You currently offer a tool which offers two levels of functionality: one level in the free version, and both levels in the subscriber version. Why should anyone using the free version and another tool for the second level of functionality have that second level of functionality blocked in other tools because we want to use your free version? |
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Hi awj, We're looking into whether we can turn off the dummy files for the free edition, but there are workarounds which should be a bit easier than disabling Web Workbench each time you create a file. The easiest is as follows: * Create your file with the .less extension instead of .chirp.less. Hope this helps! Disclaimer: I don't use Chirpy myself so I may have misunderstood your desired workflow. In particular it looks like Chirpy prevents us from highlighting when the extension is .chirp.less, so I am wondering if you are wanting to use the .less extension instead of .chirp.less -- please let me know if this is the case! |
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I just started to try your suggestion. I got to step 1 where I created test.less. It appears that Web Workbench does not handle the syntax at all. As you can see in this screenshot, Visual Studio is underlining them as a syntactical error. I didn't bother following on after this, but I am now wondering why I'm bothering with Web Workbench at all if it's not even going to handle straightforward LESS syntax in a file named test.less, that is, without .chirp. in the filename. Amongst other extensions, I have as I mentioned earlier got Chirpy and Microsoft's Web Essentials installed. Do you think either of these might be preventing Web Workbench from handling the LESS syntax? Incidentally, why is Web Workbench unable to work with .chirp.less files? Doesn't Visual Studio still see these as .LESS files in the same way that ir regards, say, jquery.min.js as a javascript file? After all, .min.js is not a recognised extension, but neither Visual Studio or any browser has a problem with recognising that it's a .js file. |
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Hmm, there seems to be an intermittent conflict. I was able to reproduce your problem after starting a new project with both Web Workbench and Chirpy installed, but after doing a disable-re-enable of Chirpy via Add-In Manager, the highlighting started working again. It was also restored for .chirp.less files -- see attached screenshot. We are not yet sure of the cause or solution but will certainly investigate -- thanks for letting us know. [quote user="awj"]why is Web Workbench unable to work with .chirp.less files?[/quote] It is able to work with .chirp.less files -- it treats them as any other .less file. The reason for suggesting the rename trick is to avoid file existence conflicts when 'handing over' the .less file from Web Workbench to Chirpy. |
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Hi awj, We have a candidate solution which will prevent the free edition from associating the custom tool, leaving the generated file names free for Chirpy to do its thing. We have a little more testing do on this but hopefully it will be in the next update, probably in the next day or two. We're still investigating why syntax highlighting sometimes gets turned off when Chirpy is present. It seems to get turned off when you create a .chirp.less file (and starts working again if you restart VS with Chirpy disabled, even if you subsequently re-enable Chirpy), but we're not sure what the interaction is between Chirpy and Web Workbench that causes the problem. |
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I really appreciate the effort and attention you're giving this, Ivan. One small point I should make is that Chirpy allows you to change the filename trigger that it looks for - I myself have configured it to look for myCss.max.less rather than myCss.chirp.less. I mention this just in case you were working on the assumption that it would always be .chirp.less. Also, I have noticed that, like you said two posts back, the syntax highlighting issue is intermittent. Sometimes I can open a file and it's recognised entirely as LESS; sometimes the entire file can be underline in red; other times the red underlining starts part-way through the file. |
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The change I've made doesn't look for any particular file extension -- it just removes the custom tool association from .less files as you create them. So you will be able to use Chirpy with any .less file (per Chirpy configuration of course). We are still discussing the exact desired behaviour internally (I'm a little concerned this could inconvenience users with .less files created under Free moving to Pro) but if we do change the behaviour we will bear your comments in mind. Thanks for letting us know -- we're not always aware of the myriad ways people configure their conventions! If you're seeing consistent spurious underlining on a per-file basis (that is, some files get spurious underlines, some don't, but it's always the same ones and always in the same places) then this might not be a Chirpy interaction -- it could be that you're using a CSS or LESS construct which we don't recognise (or recognise incorrectly) and we are failing to recover from our error. Would you be willing to share your file(s) so we can see if we can reproduce this? You can attach a file via the Options tab. Thanks! |
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Ivan, you can see in this screenshot that the attached file (common.max.less) has the red underline part-way through. Note that I had to add .txt to the filename as your uploader doesn't allow .less files to be uploaded. This screenshot shows a far simpler file which also shows the same red underlining. It doesn't appear as if I can upload more than one file, so this short one hasn't been attached. Lastly, you can see from this screenshot that I do have Web Workbench running. I can offer several more examples if you like, but I don't think these examples will be unusual or unorthodox. [btw, due to business commitments I won't be able to respond to any more posts for several days.] |
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