Intellisense Improvements in Visual Studio 2010

This is another post on the 10-4 series. I showed some screen shots of the Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 in the last post and promised that we will be discussing some of the breaking changes in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010. So, in this post we are going to see some of the exciting, very handy change and good improvement in Intellisense.

A major thing you will notice that Intellisense now supports search by Keywords i.e. the Intellisense will filter no matter you type characters that are either in start or in between or at the end of any member. Let’s look at the screenshot below:

You can notice that I just type ‘Co’ and it brings out all the members containing Co such as BackgroundColor, ResetColor, TreatControlCAsInput etc. So it will be pretty handful for the programmers as they don’t have to recognize the exact starting characters to filter results.

Another good point you might have noticed is that earlier Intellisense use to apply filter in a drop down where as now Intellisense only display the members with a particular keyword rather than a drop down.

The last major change is something related to Pascal casing. Now most of us follow Pascal casing for our methods, properties and class name. So the Intellisense now supports Pascal Case filtering. For instance, I want to search a method CompareTo and I can simple search that by writing CT (based on the pascal case) so the Intellisense will recognize it and will display the filtered result as shown in the code below:

Those were some of the pretty cool features in Visual Studio 2010 Intellisense that will help programmers in finding classes and other members. I hope you like them. Until next post, have a great time!