Moving from typings to @types using Visual Studio & Typescript 2.0.3

Question

I've tried to remove typings from my web project (Visual Studio 2015 Community) and install d.ts files via new NPM @types (typescript 2.0.3) in package.json:

 "dependencies": {
    "@types/angular": "^1.5.8",
    "@types/angular-cookies": "^1.4.2",
    "@types/angular-local-storage": "^0.1.33",
    "@types/angular-material": "^1.1.37",
    "@types/angular-translate": "^2.4.33",
    "@types/lodash": "^4.14.36"
  }

Visual Studio's IntelliSense worked nicely with typings before because I included typings folder in my VS project. NPM installs types into node_modules/@types folder. Now here is my problem. I don't really want to include anything from node_modules in VS project. node_modules folder should be fine to get deleted and recreated again by npm at will. Visual Studio does not recognize the typings installed without them being included in the project! I guess I could create a file with ///reference tags in it but then I would have to maintain this file manually when installing/removing typings.

Is there any recommended way to make VS IntelliSense work?

Answer 1

I was struggling with this same problem after making the switch to 2.0 and using the new @types convention.

I found this useful property after looking into the spec for the tsconfig.json here: http://json.schemastore.org/tsconfig

"typeRoots" property of compilerOptions.

I could not get the files or include arrays to pull in my typings, but this seems to have done the trick for me.

My tsconfig.json file as an example:

{
  "compileOnSave": true,
  "compilerOptions": {
    "outDir": "./dist/",
    "sourceMap": true,
    "noImplicitAny": false,
    "module": "commonjs",
    "target": "es5",
    "jsx": "react",
    "typeRoots": [
      "node_modules/@types"
    ]
  }
}

Hope this helps someone with the same issue.