IntelliSense

IntelliSense is the name applied to a collection of different coding aids surfaced within the text editor window. Its sole purpose is to help you, the developer, write a syntactically correct line of code quickly. In addition, it tries to provide enough guidance to help you write lines of code that are correct in context (that is, code that makes sense given the surrounding lines of code).

As you type within the text editor, IntelliSense is the behind-the-scenes agent responsible for providing a list of code fragments that match the characters you have already entered, highlighting/preselecting the one that makes the most sense given the surrounding context, and, if so commanded, automatically inserting that code fragment in-line. This saves you the time of looking up types and members in the reference documentation and saves time again by inserting code without your having to actually type the characters for that code.

We spend a lot of time in this section discussing IntelliSense in the context of editing code, but you should know that IntelliSense also works with other document types such as XML documents, HTML documents, and Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) files.


Tip

Attaching a schema to an XML document is beneficial from an IntelliSense perspective. The schema is used to further enhance the capabilities of the List Members function. (See the “List Members” section later in this chapter.)


Many discrete pieces to IntelliSense seamlessly work in conjunction with one another as you are writing code. You can trigger all these IntelliSense features directly from the Edit, IntelliSense menu or by pressing Ctrl+Space. Many of the features can be found as well on the text editor’s context menu or by right-clicking anywhere in the editor window. Let’s look at them one by one.

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