Visual Basic Intellisense Improvements in VS 2008

Posted By: Beth Massi | Aug 14th, 2007 @ 4:14 PM | 14,713 Views | 17 Comments
In this interview Lisa Feigenbaum, a Program Manager on the Visual Basic Editor, shows us all the improvements made to the Intellisense support in Visual Basic including keyword and local variable Intellisense, new language feature support, and top customer requests. Although every feature is important, the biggest chunk of the work this cycle was supporting the new language features including LINQ. As Lisa puts it, "The most time was actually spent on the language features because the compiler team went crazy this release" [laughter ensues].

Join Lisa and I as she demonstrates exactly what we can look forward to with Visual Basic Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008! 
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#Aug 14th, 2007 @ 5:59 PM
z2bass
z2bass
AH!
Hmmm... what a strange coincidence... I was just plugging in some VB in VS 2008... Big Smile
#Aug 17th, 2007 @ 2:22 PM
webmonkey
webmonkey
How am i supposed to code with theeeeeese ?
I think I'm going to download Orcas as soon as I get to work on monday before I do any more of this project.

Thank you for fixing the indentation bug, and the new intellisense looks like just what I need.

 Big Smile
#Aug 18th, 2007 @ 12:20 PM
AJenbo
AJenbo

Good to see improvement on this nice feature.

#Aug 18th, 2007 @ 4:24 PM
rhm
rhm
I was amazed at first watching this video. At about the 9 min mark they start talking about how the Orcas editor prompts with variable names at the start of lines whereas you supposedly had to type them in verbatim in previous versions. That's not true at all and I'm wondering if the *PM* of the editor team doesn't know their own product very well or if they are intentionally misleading us to make Oracs look like more of an improvement than it actually is.

At around the 20 min mark they do mention the ctrl-space feature of previous versions, but the fact is you can use that anywhere to kick intellisense into action once you have as little as one character of the variable name typed. I write VB code all day every day at work and I'm hitting ctrl-space like I have a nervous tick! A collegue was watching me type some code recently and noticed that I had intellisense popping up all over the place and I told them about ctrl-space because apparently not all programmers know about it either. It's nice that the Orcas editor pops it up automatically, but it's not such a huge change.

As for keyword completion... the keywords are not that long to type and how bad a programmer would you have to be to not remember the keywords for your language of choice? The help-tips are nice for beginners as well, but I hope there's a way to turn them off.


#Aug 19th, 2007 @ 5:33 PM
Ben Amada
Ben Amada
rhm wrote:
I was amazed at first watching this video. At about the 9 min mark they start talking about how the Orcas editor prompts with variable names at the start of lines whereas you supposedly had to type them in verbatim in previous versions. That's not true at all and I'm wondering if the *PM* of the editor team doesn't know their own product very well or if they are intentionally misleading us to make Oracs look like more of an improvement than it actually is.


In VS2005, I have to type the complete variable name -- there is no intellisense showing me previously declared variables.  Is there some setting in VS2005 to enable what you are referring to?
#Aug 20th, 2007 @ 4:33 AM
yaskil
yaskil
rhm wrote:
As for keyword completion... the keywords are not that long to type and how bad a programmer would you have to be to not remember the keywords for your language of choice? The help-tips are nice for beginners as well, but I hope there's a way to turn them off.


You might be right. But if what if you are using different CLR based languages at the same time. You may forget some keyword of each language at any time. For instance I am using C++, VB.NET and C# on different projects. When I use C# for a long time, I can confuse on VB.NET. As this, some time you can confuse while declaring code snippets. Please take a look at property definition on C# and VB.NET they not equal and might be confusing Wink. That does not shows that you are a bad programmer but shows that you are a human, not a machine Wink. VS Team makes machine to help people I think this is cool...
#Aug 20th, 2007 @ 9:18 AM
rhm
rhm
Ben Amada wrote:

rhm wrote:I was amazed at first watching this video. At about the 9 min mark they start talking about how the Orcas editor prompts with variable names at the start of lines whereas you supposedly had to type them in verbatim in previous versions. That's not true at all and I'm wondering if the *PM* of the editor team doesn't know their own product very well or if they are intentionally misleading us to make Oracs look like more of an improvement than it actually is.


In VS2005, I have to type the complete variable name -- there is no intellisense showing me previously declared variables.  Is there some setting in VS2005 to enable what you are referring to?


Yes, as I said in my comment, even going back to 2003 you could use ctrl-space to activate intellisence anywhere.

Try:

Dim aVariable As String

Then type "a" and hit ctrl-space. It's not as neat as what's been shown for orcas because the popup includes every symbol in scope that starts with the letter 'a'. But it will autocomplete when you've typed enough characters to disambiguate. In the example above typing "av" and hitting ctrl-space will complete the variable name because it's the only symbol in scope that starts with "av".
#Aug 20th, 2007 @ 6:38 PM
Ben Amada
Ben Amada
rhm wrote:

Ben Amada wrote: 
rhm wrote: I was amazed at first watching this video. At about the 9 min mark they start talking about how the Orcas editor prompts with variable names at the start of lines whereas you supposedly had to type them in verbatim in previous versions. That's not true at all and I'm wondering if the *PM* of the editor team doesn't know their own product very well or if they are intentionally misleading us to make Oracs look like more of an improvement than it actually is.


In VS2005, I have to type the complete variable name -- there is no intellisense showing me previously declared variables.  Is there some setting in VS2005 to enable what you are referring to?


Yes, as I said in my comment, even going back to 2003 you could use ctrl-space to activate intellisence anywhere.

Try:

Dim aVariable As String

Then type "a" and hit ctrl-space. It's not as neat as what's been shown for orcas because the popup includes every symbol in scope that starts with the letter 'a'. But it will autocomplete when you've typed enough characters to disambiguate. In the example above typing "av" and hitting ctrl-space will complete the variable name because it's the only symbol in scope that starts with "av".


Thanks for the example, it works :O  I guess I don't need to upgrade to VS2008 now.  J/K .... I can't wait for RTM to try out all the new features and improvements.  Thx again.
#Aug 20th, 2007 @ 11:36 PM
pre
pre
This to mee seems like its getting a little ridiculous with the intellisense. Is it really necessary to have intellisense pop up for Dim and As? I see this as overkill. Is there a way to turn off intellisense for keywords?

I'm also not sure I'm too happy with the lack of needing type declarations for variables. What happens when OptionStrict is off, is the type still implied? Its hard enough working on team projects and keeping track of other developers variables but adding on top of that a feature that negates the need for a type is going to make that process even harder. Hopefully that can be turned off as well.
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