Sasha Sydoruk

One of the really nice features in Visual Studio 2005 is the IntelliSense support in xml files including web.config. No longer do you have to copy some snippets from other web sites just because you don’t quite remember the exact spelling of something like this:

        < membership>
< providers>
< add name=“AspNetSqlMembershipProvider“ type=“System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider,                         System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”
connectionStringName=“LocalSqlServer”
enablePasswordRetrieval=“false”
enablePasswordReset=“true”
requiresQuestionAndAnswer=“true”
applicationName=“/”
requiresUniqueEmail=“false”
passwordFormat=“Hashed”
maxInvalidPasswordAttempts=“5”
minRequiredPasswordLength=“7”
minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters=“1”
passwordAttemptWindow=“10”
passwordStrengthRegularExpression=“” />
providers>
membership>
But from time to time you will notice that IntelliSense in web.config disappears. It just does not work anymore. You restart Visual Studio, reload the solution but it still does not work.

What is the problem? What caused this? Web Site Administration Tool is the culprit. WSAT is a great tool and allows to jumpstart the application but when the changes to web.config are saved, the following change is made:
< configuration>

Will be changed to this:
< configuration xmlns=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0“>

Once the namespace information has been added to the configuration tag, the IntelliSense no longer works. The only way to make it work is to remove xmlns attribute.