Import namespace in VB9

Sun, May 20, 2007, 02:10 PM under Orcas | VisualStudio
A cute Whidbey feature in the C# 2.0 editor is that when you type in a Type that is not in scope, the IDE will let you choose to automatically either fully qualify the type or to add the appropriate using statement at the top. The editor for the VB8 experience is not that great, as shown by the following side-by-side screenshot:

BTW, for my C# readers, that is not a mistake, VB does allow partial naming of namespaces so since System is in scope, you can simply type Threading.Thread and it is acceptable. A bad habit IMO, I suggest as a guideline that you fully qualify the types starting at the root namespace.

Recently I was typing some VB9 code in "Orcas" and observed that the VB editor has caught up with the C# behaviour (plus it follows my guideline of the previous paragraph), as shown by the following screenshot:

Nice! And just like any other IDE language feature, it is not just for the latest version, but for the previous version as well (thanks to multitargeting).