Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX

4.4. Supporting IntelliSense

Most people agree that one of the best features of Visual Studio is IntelliSense. Having contextual information about class members during development makes the process more efficient. It eliminates a lot of the need to jump back and forth between coding and documentation. Not only does IntelliSense give you information about what members are available, but it also provides abbreviated help about parameters and return values.

A big part of the IntelliSense feature is driven by the use of reflection by Visual Studio over the managed types referenced by the project. However, this does not work very well with a dynamic language like JavaScript. Even though, ASP.NET has worked out a way to provide IntelliSense with the JavaScript that you type.

You will only find this feature with the ASP.NET 3.5 release and when using Visual Studio 2008. When you start typing, you will immediately see IntelliSense for the JavaScript that you are working with. This is illustrated here in Figure 4-5.

Figure 4-5. Figure 4-5

IntelliSense with JavaScript simply works in Visual Studio, which uses inference when figuring out what to display. For instance, if you are working with a <div> tag through JavaScript, Visual Studio's IntelliSense will figure out through inference that it is an HTML element and provide you with the proper methods and properties in the IntelliSense drop-down. ...