March 12th, 2019

Argument completion made easy with Visual Studio IntelliCode

Mark Wilson-Thomas
Mark Wilson-Thomas
Principal Program Manager

Visual Studio IntelliCode saves you time by putting what you’re most likely to use at the top of your completion list. IntelliCode recommendations are based on thousands of open source projects on GitHub, each with over 100 stars. When combined with the context of your code, the completion list is tailored to promote common practices. As a result, instead of having to search and scroll through sorted lists, you get suggestions on the most likely ones for your coding context as you type.

Now we’re making selecting the right arguments easier too!

What does it do?

IntelliCode now makes recommendations for arguments in your C# code. Just install the latest release of the IntelliCode extension for Visual Studio  and start editing C# code. It’s a simple as that!

When you enter an argument, you’ll notice the familiar starred IntelliCode recommendations appear when you’re typing. If you want to see a suggested argument without even typing a single character, you can also invoke IntelliSense directly with Ctrl+Space.

Parameter completion, showing a recommendation from IntelliCode

Your feedback matters

We hope you enjoy this new feature – if you have more suggestions and feedback about it or other parts of IntelliCode, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch  and let us know more.

Category
Visual Studio
Topics
IntelliCode IntelliSense Machine Learning

Author

Mark Wilson-Thomas
Mark Wilson-Thomas
Principal Program Manager

Mark is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio IDE team, where he's been building developer tools for over 15 years. Most recently he's been working on AI assisted developer tools like GitHub Copilot Chat for Visual Studio. Prior to that, he worked on the Visual Studio Editor, and on tools for Office, SQL, WPF and Silverlight.

eighteen comments

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  • Tim Chen

    Ctrl + Space is an input method toggle shortcut key, which can cause its work to fail.
    Ctrl+Space is the shortcut key for switching input methods, which will cause its work to fail.

    • Mark Wilson-Thomas Microsoft employee Author

      Hi Tim.
      Thanks for your comment - can you give a few more details? It may be easier to report the problem via report a problem if it's in Visual Studio, or our Github issues list if it's in Visual Studio Code - see  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/intellicode/faq#q -where-should-i-raise-bugs-issues-or-feature-requests
      Thanks for trying IntelliCode,
      Mark
       

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      • Mark Wilson-Thomas Microsoft employee Author

        Hi again Tim
        Following up further, if I've understood your comment correctly, you are saying that Ctrl+Space is already used to toggle the Chinese Input Method Editor on and off, which causes a clash with the Visual Studio shortcut.
        If that is indeed the problem you are facing, you should be able to work around it by changing the shortcut for the “Edit. CompleteWord” command in Visual Studio from Ctrl+Space to something else that works well...

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  • Науменко Роман Борисович

    It would be greate if Ctrl+Space would also invoke a parameters info popup.

    • Wil Wilder Apaza Bustamante

      This comment has been deleted.

    • Mark Wilson-Thomas Microsoft employee Author

      Thanks for the feedback Науменко. I will pass it on to the right folks as this is a general feature of IntelliSense.
      If you're editing along a line of code and your caret enters the braces because you just typed left brace, the parameter quick info popup should already be there when you hit ctrl+space, and remain when you've pressed Ctrl+Space. However if you place the caret into the braces from somewhere else, and hit Ctrl+Space,...

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      • Науменко Роман Борисович

        …when you’ve pressed Ctrl+Space. However if you place the caret into the braces from somewhere else, and hit Ctrl+Space, right now it doesn’t show the parameter quick info
        Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. Thank you for forwarding it to the right folks.

  • Brilliant Mbumwae

    I guess the focus was on C#, this makes me feel left out. It’s in my opinion that let the update also be made available to VB.NET. Folks like are practicing Vb.net whilst learning C#. Don’t leave us behind. 

    • SuperCocoLoco .

      +1

    • Mark Wilson-Thomas Microsoft employee Author

      Hi Brilliant

      Argument Completion IntelliCode is a preview experimental feature at this point. Once we’ve had chance to take feedback and ensure it’s meeting expectations, we’ll look at potential to broaden it to other languages beyond C#. 

      Thanks

      Mark

  • P Kevin

    why not support autocomplete function “（）”？

    • Mark Wilson-Thomas Microsoft employee Author

      Hi P Kevin
      Thanks for the feedback.
      I'd like to make sure I'm clear on what you're asking: are you suggesting that we should trigger autocompletion when you type open brace, so you don't need to press Ctrl+Space to bring up the argument completion list? That's something we could potentially consider as an optional behavior. Or is it something else?
      I'd be happy to chat in person - drop me an email mwthomas at microsoft...

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      • Lukas Fellechner

        Yes, please allow us to enable auto completion on brace open! Argument completion works really good for what I see, and I'd like it to come up as soon as a method (with parameters) is called.
        C++ intellisense has lots of advanced options, which allow specifying this (among a lot of other things). But in C# there is only a poor amount of options for IntelliSense. Now that we have IntelliCode, it is even more...

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      • Lukas Fellechner

        I have noticed that suggestions already come up at brace open, if the first parameter is a enum. But now with IntelliCode, this should be enhanced to always come up (at least optionally). One more suggestion I have: For boolean, it would be great if "true" and "false" are always suggested. They are heavily used but currently not recommened or preferred in any way. We have a lot of classes with "tracer" field. Now if I...

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      • Mark Wilson-Thomas Microsoft employee Author

        Thanks for your feedback Lukas, it is much appreciated. I’ll take this up with the team.

        Mark

  • Sam Larko

    Is VB supported?   This would be great for C# devs like me that are working on a VB app that can’t be converted per client demands.

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