Intellisense for Google Closure Library in VS 2010 (MVC)

Visual Studio examines your javascript to provide intellisense, and lets you add references to other javascript files to pull info from.  To get closure classes to show up I created a plovr config and did a grep of the whole closure library to find goog.provide calls and converted them to goog.require calls.  Then I did a build to include all the code for closure, resulting in Test.7z (534kb).  It contains the following files:

• Test\test-config.js: plovr config file, uncomment the module you want to build and run through plovr
• Test\test.js: goog.require for entire closure library
• Test\test2.js: missing requires for gears, crypt, test, and some others I'll never use
• Test\test3.js: also missing goog.ui.editor
• Test\closure_complete.js: built from test.js, 4.1mb
• Test\closure_mostly.js: built from test2.js, 2.6mb
• Test\closure_noeditor.js: built from test3.js, 2.4mb

The easiest way to use them would be to unpack in your Content directory and add this line to the top of your javascript files (has to be the first thing):

/// <reference path="~/Content/Test/closure_mostly.js">

Note: you don't have to add the files to your project, but it uses the same url pathing as if they were part of your web site.

You could also just build your project in WHITESPACE mode and use the generated file.  If you use SIMPLE mode, the closure compiler will shorten your parameter names.  If you use ADVANCED mode the closure compiler would shorten all the names and wouldn't even include code you didn't use.

Building PLOVR on Windows

I wanted to add options to plovr, specifically the ability to output a property map to use for interacting with my server using JSON.

First I installed Mercurial which is needed to get the plovr source code.  I installed it to I:\Programs\Mercurial and added that to my path.

Next I got the plovr source code:
I:\plovr\SRC>hg clone https://plovr.googlecode.com/hg/ plovr

I saw it had a build.xml file so I downloaded apache ant and unzipped it to I:\Programs\apache-ant-1.8.2, adding I:\Programs\apache-ant-1.8.2\bin to my path also.

Building produced an error that bash wasn't found, so I downloaded MSYS (MinGW not needed) and installed it to I:\Programs\msys\1.0.

Then I just started an msys shell and did:
$ cd /i/plovr/src/plovr
$ ant


And voila - /i/plovr/SRC/plovr/build/plovr.jar (i:\plovr\SRC\plovr\build\plovr.jar) is now there!