The Moth

From the first time I typed Visual Basic code in Orcas I've had on my list to do a short video to show the new and improved intellisense because only video can do it justice. Since Amanda let the cat out of the bag by posting some screenshots, I am left with no choice but to share even more of the intellisense story with you :-)

Basically, it is everywhere. When you start typing "D" to declare/dimension a variable, it will pop up:

...when you then continue to declare the type of the variable, it will help you again:

...it comes into its own with the new LINQ syntax:

...and at the end of code line, when you press the spacebar, it will even prompt you for the continuation line:


You just have to go type some VB code in Orcas to truly appreciate how helpful it is. However, the killer for me is what I will refer to as "member filtering" as I have no idea what the official name is. With this feature, after hitting the dot (".") on a class variable and as you type, the intellisense window filters down to the more appropriate member. See the following 3 screen captures that I combined into one screenshot image:



In the example above, first we have the list of all members of the Process class, then after typing "p" the list gets filtered down to only members starting with p and then finally when we type "ro" the list goes down to just the two members starting with "pro". If I continued typing when I reached "n" in "ProcessN" I would have been left with just one member.

And all this great intellisense is of course also available when targeting .NET 2.0 projects (minus the LINQ stuff) due to the Orcas multi-targeting.