Visual Studio, Razor, BuildProviders and Intellisense

I'm trying to get Intellisense working for razor views in a non-ASP.NET project and would like to understand the relationship between VisualStudio's Razor editor and BuildProviders.

For background, I'm writing a framework on top of Manos (mono web server) that uses Razor for its view engine. I've got that part working perfectly, but Intellisense in VS doesn't work giving a range of errors from unknown types to unregistered build providers, depending on where the output DLL's of the project are placed.

My project is a .NET Class Library, with .cshtml files (build action none). The base razor view class is defined in a separate assembly (outside the project) which could be registered in the GAC, but currently isn't.

I've already read these articles:

• http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/2011/Jan/开发者_运维百科12/IntelliSense-for-Razor-Hosting-in-nonWeb-Applications
• Need razor view engine auto-complete to work in a class library?
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2011/01/20/how-to-get-razor-intellisense-for-model-in-a-class-library-project.aspx
• .NET - Razor outside MVC application - Problems with removing @inherits and providing @model

Sounds like I need to write my own BuildProvider, but can't find any documentation explaining the relationship between a build provider and razor intellisense.

Razor intellisense is flaky at best currently. However, if you're using VS SP1, its slightly better. The web.config workaround (as pointed in your third link) works for me in a class library as long as the extension is cshtml (haven't tried vbhtml so can't say for sure).

Also take a look here: http://razorpad.codeplex.com/ Similar to LinqPad, this will allow you to test your razor code ahead of time.

The Razor editor is pretty heavily tied in to the ASP.Net runtime, in fact it actually runs ASP.Net in the background in order to collect the necessary run-time information.

My only suggestion for getting true-fidelity IntelliSense is a bit of a super-hack. Rather than a Class Library, you could make your application a Web Application Project. A WAP is actually just a class library which VS can host a website from. if you clean out ALL the extra stuff (Global.asax, web.config, etc.) you may get exactly what you're looking for. It's a workaround, and a bit of a stretch at that but give it a shot, it may just work :)