Razor Notes

VS.NET Intelli-sense for self-hosting projects

VS.NET Intelli-sense relies on the Web.config that VS.NET looks for in the root directory of your host projects. As self-hosting projects are Console Applications they instead use App.config instead which is all ServiceStack looks at for configuring Razor.

Unfortunately as VS.NET's Razor intelli-sense is coupled to ASP.NET MVC, it requires a dummy Web.config in your self-hosted projects which just contains a copy of the Razor configuration in your App.config (which was originally populated when adding the ServiceStack.Razor NuGet Package to your project). The Web.config is otherwise benign and has no other effect other than enabling VS.NET's intelli-sense.

Intelli-sense for View Models

The @model T attribute isn't known to VS.NET intelli-sense when self-hosting which means you need to its more verbose alias:

@inherits ViewPage<T>

Missing Razor configuration

The razor Web.config sections added by ServiceStack.Razor normally use the version of ASP.NET WebPages that's installed on your computer included with VS.NET installation and updates and is normally located under:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\

This holds the different version of ASP.NET Web pages installed, e.g:

v1.0\
v2.0\

If this is missing, another option for installing ASP.NET WebPages is via NuGet, i.e:

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages -Version 1.0.20105.408

If you instead installed the latest version of WebPages (currently at v3.1.1), e.g:

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.WebPages

You would need to change the version number in the Razor Web.config to reference Version=3.0.0.0.

Only configuration section used

ServiceStack doesn't use the ASP.NET WebPages implementation itself, the configuration is primarily included to enable VS.NET intelli-sense and provide a way to configure the default namespaces added to Razor pages.

This can also be done in code by adding to the Config.RazorNamespaces collection, but adding them to the config section lets VS.NET knows about them so you can get proper intelli-sense.