Professional Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 7. IntelliSense and Bookmarks

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Improving efficiency with contextual help

• Detecting and fixing simple errors

• Reducing keystrokes

• Generating code

• Navigating source code with bookmarks

One thing that Microsoft has long been good at is providing automated help as you write your code. Older versions of Visual Basic had a limited subset of this automated intelligence known as IntelliSense, but with the introduction of Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft firmly established the technology throughout the whole IDE. With recent releases of Visual Studio, IntelliSense has become so pervasive that it has been referred to as IntelliSense Everywhere.

This chapter illustrates the many ways in which IntelliSense helps you write your code. Among the topics covered are detecting and repairing syntax errors, harnessing contextual information, and variable name completion. You also learn how to set and use bookmarks in your code for easier navigation.

INTELLISENSE EXPLAINED

IntelliSense is the general term for automated help and actions in a Microsoft application. The most commonly encountered aspects of IntelliSense are those wavy lines you see under words that are not spelled correctly in Microsoft Word, or the small visual indicators in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that inform you that the contents of the particular cell do not conform to what was expected.

Even these basic indicators enable you to quickly perform related actions. Right-clicking a word with red wavy underlining in ...