Enabling Support for HTML 5 Schema Validation in Visual Studio 2010

Out of the box, HTML 5 schema validation is not supported in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.  The folks on the Visual Web Developer Team rectified this for VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer, but they did not provide any update for VS 2010 (that I know of).  No matter, you can use the 2008 version – here’s how.

1. Download the schema update for VS 2008/VWD

2. Open the downloaded zip file and follow the instructions in the ReadMe.txt file except:

2.a) Where it says to add the schema to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html, replace the 9.0 with 10.0 – the path for VS 2010 (in 64 bit Windows) is:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html

2.b) Edit the VS registry file matching your Windows environment, and again change the 9.0 to 10.0 – e.g. for my Windows 7 64 bit machine the correct registry file is:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Packages\{1B437D20-F8FE-11D2-A6AE-00104BCC7269}\Schemas\Schema 23]
"File"="html\\html_5.xsd"
"Friendly Name"="HTML 5"
"URI"="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/html-5"

3. Back up your registry

4. Run the registry file (as always, take caution)