Binarymist

I recently evaluated the support for the top two CSS preprocessors (Sass and Less) for the environment my client team and myself are currently constrained to (Visual Studio 2012).

I setup Less and Sass and decided to go with Sass. Below I outline what the process was, briefly what each has to offer and why the decision went the Sass way. Both Sass and Less are super sets of CSS, so you can just rename your CSS file extension to .less if using Less or .scss (file extension for the newer Sass format (stands for Sassy CSS)) if you decide to use Sass and save the file. A CSS file will be automatically generated. Now you can just start changing the CSS to Sass or Less to start using all the new functionality you have at your disposal. There is no preprocessor lock-in. If I decided to change to Less or even back to CSS, you’d just do the same thing with the generated CSS file.

If you’re not up to speed on what a CSS preprocessor is or why you would want to use one on your web project, now’s a good time to find out before we carry on with the two setup procedures. Go and checkout Sass and Less.

Less

Less was originally written in Ruby, but later re-written in JavaScript.

Less setup is reasonably straight forward, but didn’t work straight away like the last time I used it. Turns out it was just an install order thing.
In Visual Studio…
Install “Web Essentials 2012” through TOOLS -> Extensions and Updates
Then
Install Web Developer Tools 2012.2. You may have them already installed. Install them again if you do.
Web Essentials actually provides us with a lot of other features I’d promote like JSHint (a better JSLint) and quite a few other goodies.

In Visual Studio TOOLS -> Options -> Web Essentials -> LESS
You’ll see something like this…

This is how I set up the options. I usually turn of the “Show preview window”, but it’s fine to have it on to start with, so you can see the .css getting generated side by side with the Less.There are other extensions that support Less also, but I think this was the easiest setup.

Sass (scss)

Written in Ruby.

I tried the SassyStudio extension. It has

1. syntax highlighting
2. region outlining
3. some intellisense support
4. CSS generation.

I also tried Mindscape Web Workbench which also has CoffeeScript and LESS support. It has what SassyStudio has plus

1. (by the look of it, better intellisense support)
2. warnings of syntax errors
3. warnings of unknown variables and mixins
4. go to variable or mixin definition
5. CSS file minification (pro edition only. You probably don’t need this as there are plenty of other ways to minify)
6. more customisation capabilities than SassyStudio.

The Setup

You may also need to Install Web Developer Tools 2012.2 as I did for the Less trial above. You may as well do this anyway to make sure you’re on the latest version.
In Visual Studio…
Install “Mindscape Web Workbench” through TOOLS -> Extensions and Updates.

Better Sass (or more correctly with the new format scss) extensions will keep appearing I’d say, so when they do it’d probably be worth looking at them. The only thing so far I don’t like about Mindscape Web Workbench is that it has a small “Go Pro” label at the bottom of the scss file. I don’t think it’ll bother anyone to much though.

Adding a scss file

Right click on the folder you want to add the new file to -> Add -> New Scss File… -> Save

Once you’ve created a new scss file or renamed a CSS file to have the .scss extension and saved it, for now we can commit both of these files to source control. You’ll need to setup a preprocessor on the build server in order to be able to not have the generated CSS files in source control.

Why I chose Scss over Less

Sass has similar functionalities to Less (nested rules, variables, mixins, functions, inheritance, operators), but it can be used with Compass and Susy. Compass provides a framework of functions and add-ons built on top of Sass. Compass automatically handles image spriting, writes cleaner code, provides page layout tools, resets and lots of other useful features. Susy is a responsive grid add-on for Compass. Mindscape Web Workbench also provides support for Compass . So if we want to take advantage of these sometime, they are available.

Sass (scss) Resources

Tags: CSS, JSHint, less, preprocessor, Sass, scss, visual studio

This entry was posted on November 26, 2013 at 23:50 and is filed under CSS, Microsoft, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.