Network Programming in .NET

If you’re using an IDE like Visual Studio to write web apps, then you may have noticed these “(in <filename>.d.ts)” appearing in the intellisense. Most of these are in-built, but you can write your own in order to customise how this appears, so that you can provide added assistance to people using your Javascript library. Here I am experimenting with the SMTPJS.com Javascript library.

First, I’m going to auto-generate my d.ts file using Typescript (TSC). So I just rename my js file to a .ts file and run this

tsc –lib dom,ES6 smtp.debug.ts –declaration

The libaries used here (ES6 & dom) where what I needed for my file, you might need to play with this to get it to work with your Javascript.

This generates a Typings file (d.ts) as follows;

declare var Email: {
send: (params: any) => Promise<{}>;
ajaxPost: (url: any, params: any, callback: any) => void;
ajax: (src: any, callback: any) => void;
createCORSRequest: (method: any, url: any) => XMLHttpRequest;
};

Then you optionally can reference the typings file from the JS file like so;

/// <reference path=”smtp.debug.d.ts” />

However, I found the IDE picked it up automatically, even without this, due to the file names. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to load a remote d.ts file, so I abandoned this project at this point.