IntelliSense Question.

[Shawn]

I have been using VB.NET for some time and have recently taken over several
C#.NET apps. My only frustration with it is that IntelliSense does not seem
to work as well with C#. It seems the best way to get it to check for errors
is to re-compile where as for VB it shows errors right away. Am I missing
something?

 

[Samuel R. Neff]

I'd strongly suggest purchasing ReSharper from JetBrains. It improves
VS.NET IDE in many ways including intellisense and immediate warnings
and compilation errors (tons of extra warnings).

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

There are other plugins that do similar thigns but I think ReSharper
is the best. The next version (currently in early-access aka alpha)
adds support for VB.NET.

Best regards,

Sam

 

[Shawn]

Good tip, thanks!!! Any idea why they are so different between VB and C# in
VS?

 

[Andy]

I have been using VB.NET for some time and have recently taken over several
C#.NET apps. My only frustration with it is that IntelliSense does not seem
to work as well with C#. It seems the best way to get it to check for errors
is to re-compile where as for VB it shows errors right away. Am I missing
something?

Yes, C# does not do background compilation, so compilation errors
won't be known until you actually compile.

 

[Samuel R. Neff]

I think it's simply the fact that there are two different development
teams (VB.NET and C#) and they both wrote their parts fo the IDE and
they have slightly different focuses. If they had the exact same
requirements and focus we wouldn't need two languages. Over time
features from one will spill into the other, but there will always be
some differentiation.

Sam

 

[Morten Wennevik [C# MVP]]

Hi Shawn,

In the C# IDE the code is not compiled in the background, so many of the errors you see in VB.Net will not be shown in C# until you manually compile. There was a reason for not doing behind-the-scenes-compiling in C#, but I fail to remember why at the moment.

 

[Andy]

Hmm, another feature of Reshaper I hadn't know about; thanks for the
tip.

 

[Mark Wilden]

Background parsing (I'm not sure if it's true compilation) is one of the
best features of ReSharper. Besides giving you constant Intellisense, it
also tells you about errors while you're typing.

///ark