Working with Polymer in Visual Studio 2015 (Preview)

In the new VS2015, there is built in Bower and npm support. This is great if you want to use Visual Studio to build Polymer components and apps. Importing the basic Polymer packages in to VS2015 is not completely straight forward unfortunately, as the autocomplete for the Bower packages doesn’t seem to work a 100% just yet.

Importing the Polymer packages with Bower in to VS2015

To import the packages polymer, polymer/core-elements and polymer/paper-elements you first edit the bower.json file in your VS2015 web project. The way to insert them is under the dependencies tag, see code snippet.

"dependencies": {
     "polymer": "^0.5.4",
	"core-elements": "Polymer/core-elements#^0.5.4",
	"paper-elements": "Polymer/paper-elements#^0.5.4"
}

After the bower.json file is edited, you will see the packages pop up under your Bower dependencies. Then you need to right click the Bower packages header and select Restore Packages to actually download the packages from Bower.

Then check your Output Window and select Package Manager Log to see what’s being imported from Bower and make sure there are no errors!

Happy Coding! 🙂