SharePoint master page and page layouts Intellisense not working

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why this wasn’t working and came across this post from John Leino – it was an absolute life saver.

I hope it saves you time at some point in the future:

http://johanleino.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/sp2010-intellisense-not-working-with-master-pages-in-vs2010/

In case the content goes missing, I have copied it here:

SP2010: Intellisense not working with master pages in VS2010

One thing I noticed when starting to work with SharePoint 2010 in Visual Studio 2010 is that when you are editing a master page (and some other type of items) you get no intellisense.

Why this is I have no idea but I can guess that it has to do with the project type that the SharePoint project is based on (getting back to that in upcoming posts…) which is not a web template.
OK, but you can get around it thought.

The solution

What you do is right-click on the .master file and choose “open with…”

Then you click the “master page editor” and click “set as default” button.

Now it should work again…