Notice anything peculiar about Intellisene lately?  Read on for a good and a bad tradeoff (which I think you'll be ok with LOL).

When you used Visual Studio 2008, did you notice anything COOL about the Intellisense window?  Check it out here.

Something to note, if you're looking at this Intellisense window and thinking, WHOA!  That's a lot more options than I've ever seen at once!  Then you missed out on one REALLY COOL feature of VS 2008 and that was the ability to resize your Intellisense options (i.e. make taller).  The other thing to notice is, in order to make it taller, the borders around the Intellisense options have to selectable and resizable.  The BAD/negative thing about this window is it was just a straight list sorted alphabetically with no fany options typing/searching/filtering options, well, except for the type ahead, as you typed, the list was narrowed down.

Fast forward a few years to Visual Studio 2010 and check out the "New and improved" Intellisense window.

First off, uuuuhhhhhhhh there's only nine (ya......9) options (instead of the 17 from VS08) and there's no resizable borders.  HHHHMMMMMM uuuhhhh Peter, I'm waiting for the "punch line" here! 

Ok, so we lost the ability to resize the window to see more, ya, I know that bites cause it helped with "discovering" more about the classes/APIs you were looking at.  I agree, that bites.  BUT!  Microsoft has given you (and me LOL) the ability to now do pascal-style, type ahead filtering!  YA, try it out and I think you'll start to LOVE the new Intellisense!

If you try using the Console.WriteLine method, watch how the "NEW" Intellisense works.  You'll see you have all of the options when you first hit the period/dot.

We know the method we want is WriteLine (hey, we've all used it enough, we know that's the name LOL), so type out WL and watch how the list is filtered down dramatically to JUST the methods that have pascal casing with W and L.

The caveat here is, once you navigate away from the Intellisense window, you lose the pascal casing filtering.  Yup, once you go away and return, the first option with the pascal casing is selected, BUT, you've lost your filter.  Not too bad, at least the option with the pascal casing is selected for you.

So there, now you know a little bit more about Visual Studio 2010 Intellisense window and how it is trying to work harder for you.  Now it's time to grab a coffee and get coding!

 

Resources:

MSDN: Change size of the intellisense window

ScottGu's Blog: VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)

Microsoft Connect: No longer able to resize the intellisense window (Daniel Smith)

MSDN: Capitalization Styles (brief explanation of Pascal case)