C# Intellisense+Expansions

Sun, September 26, 2004, 10:50 AM under dotNET
One of the major gripes I have with C# today is its inferior intellisense. [Before you tell me that has nothing to do with the language, rather it's an IDE thing, let's get things straight: I use VS for development and not Notepad; when talking about any language I always refer to the collective experience of the language plus the MSFT tools that come with it]. Back to my point: C# intellisense sucks compared to what VB has to offer. If you disagree with this, you simply have not used both environments long enough (didn't leave enough room for argument there did I ;-).

VS2005 rectifies this, and writing C# code is now a hugely improved experience. Intellisense pops up not only type declarations, but language keywords such as public, void etc; formatting of code is also better. The areas where VB's intellisense is still better, are covered by expansions, e.g. typing forr generates a reverse for loop section.

I was going to go into a full blown description of expansions and how to create your own etc, but before posting I did a search and found that someone had already done that here.

The point I am making is that in VS2005:
C# Intellisense + Expansions = VB's intellisense

While talking about Whidbey C# improvements already in VB today, C# gets nop instructions in IL so you can enter a breakpoint wherever you like (the funny thing is that some bigots used to mock VB for having this feature) and adding event handlers does not require explicit creation of a delegate (already supported in VB with AddressOf).
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