Razor syntax highlighting not working in VS 2012 with MVC 5

Question

I'm playing around with MVC 5 RC 1 in Visual Studio 2013 RC. Works very well.

Now I upgraded an existing MVC 4 project in VS 2012 to MVC 5 the same way as described here

I also changed the web.config(s) - see "upgrading from MVC4 to MVC5"

Everything (build, run web app, even intellisense) works perfectly except the syntax highlighting of Razor/C# code in views.

I also tried it with an MVC 5 project created in VS 2013. Same result. So I assume VS 2012 doesn't "understand" the new assemblies?!

Any known workaround or ideas to get highlighting back?

Answer 1

Microsoft released a new version of ASP.NET Web Tools for VS 2012. After installing syntax highlighting is back again.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/11/18/announcing-release-of-asp-net-and-web-tools-2013-1-for-visual-studio-2012.aspx

Installing VS 2012 Update 4 was not enough.

A set of offline installers is available. The offline installers are easier to use than the Web Platform Tools invoker (WebNode11Pack.exe @ ~114KB):

If you want an offline installer then please goto http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41532

• AspNetWebTools2013_1Setup.exe @ ~39MB
• WebToolsExtensionsVS.msi (for Visual Studio 2012 standard edition[s]) @ ~21MB
• WebToolsExtensionsVWD.msi (for Visual Studio 2012 free "Web" edition[s]) @ ~21MB