Arrghhghghghg! Intellisense is broken AGAIN

Member 96

Matt Gerrans wrote: Is this a problem that only happens with VB projects? If so, that would be yet another reason to upgrade to C#. Just in case you can't think up enough reasons already. I've worked on a pretty big C# .NET application for a couple years now and not see such a problem. Nahh! That's hogwash Matt. I have a very large project and it contains both VB.NET projects and C# projects. It's not possible sometimes to choose your development language for various reasons. I belive a serious developer that considers programming a profession and not just a job looks at development languages just like a carpenter looks at the various tools in their tool box. It's like saying to a carpenter "You should always use a keyhole saw because they are smaller than a cross cut saw". It's just a matter of the right tools for the job. Personally I reach for c# first almost every time in my tool box but that's not always the case for every job. I've had this problem in many c# projects of any substantial size that contained no vb.net. I don't know how common this is, but in our case we have a business object framework consisting of four separate projects, our business object library consisting of one project and right now the windows UI project. During the course of a day I'm very regularly editing and making changes in the UI and the business object library and sometimes in the framework itself. I know what you are saying, but it's really not practical for many people because of the nature of the work or the environment we work in. (I'm working with one other developer on this project and we don't have the luxury of a team of people spending eon's designing the business objects to be absolutely perfect at first go).

Member 96

I *really* want this to be the fix if it is I'm going to dance around the office with joy, I'll let you know :fingers crossed:

Member 96

C a r l wrote: I don't know if the problem also occurs with C#. It does, that's what I'm working in now. C a r l wrote: I don't see why I should force myself to code in a language that I don't like as much, especially since the features are EXACTLY THE SAME. Yeah, I agree, although for me it's C# that I'm more comfortable with, but it's just a matter of the right tool for the job I think. If I had to I could use Cobol, C, C+, Assembler, Perl, VB.NET, VB for applications, SQL, c# etc etc on and on. I'm tired of this snobbishness as well. I will say though that I think anything .net for business apps is unquestionably the way to go.

Member 96

Unfortunately that didn't solve the problem. Intellisense just broke again about two minutes ago and I double checked the license files but found no change from when I removed the blank line at the end earlier. Well it was worth a shot, thanks for the suggestion. I think I'm going to give that VisualAssist add-in a try and see if it works any better. Cheers!

Tom Archer

You don't even want to *think* about using 2005 if you're having problems with 2003. They've even managed to break (change?) tabbing through windows in that version! Cheers, Tom Archer - Archer Consulting Group Programmer Trainer and Mentor and Project Management Consultant

peterchen

what else to say? [edit]missed your last sentence, sorry. Yes, we are using it in a fewhundredKLoc project (VC6), and it's doing great. Try it, you'll love it. Their latest Release claims to do a better job at guessing (when you type only a part, or only the "initials" of a camel case word etc), and either I am hooked to some drug their marketing department uses, or maybe it simply does. I miss some options, stuff I'd like to switch on/off individually, but OTOH I am VERY happy that it isn't a "configuration nightmare".

I never really know a killer from a savior
boost your code || Fold With Us! || sighist | doxygen

Member 96

Sadly I tried Visual Assist and within a few minutes the *exact* same problems were cropping up with *their* intellisense. It's very bizarre when the exact same thing is happening with a completely different product. There is an "Get content from default intellisense" option which I ensured was turned off at all times. I can only guess that they are actually using the built in intellisense database or doing things in such a similar manner to Microsoft that whatever is weird about my project is breaking their intellisense as well. On the bright side they do a better job of presenting options and the templats look cool. At one point I was after a method called "IsUnassigned" only I typed "Un" by accident because I thought it was called "unassigned", but it still presented me with "IsUnassigned" in the popup box which is pretty cool when you think about it. In desperation I've tried stripping things out of my solution file and turning off automatic builds for all but the UI project in the solution that I'm currently working in and it hasn't broken again since but it's only been a few hours. I guess the end result is that I don't need Visual Assist if it doesn't resolve the original problem, but I'll play with it for a month and see if I can't live without it after that. Cheers and thanks for answering.

Henrik Husted

I've had the same problems, very frustrating. In the end I gave up on using VS as my main editor and now uses sourceinsight[^] as my main editor. That works! And a lot faster too. --- There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

Stuart Dootson

Tom - you can change the key binding for Ctrl+Tab to be a proper window switcher - bind it to Window.NextDocumentWindow - it seems to be bound to Window.PreviousDocumentWindowNav by default,which is why it pops up the window with all the window icons in it. HTH Stuart Dootson 'Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p'

generic_user_id

Have you tried deleting the project's ncb file? That may fix it.

SimonS

I feel your pain. During one of our many calls to PSS we were told to delete the corrupt csprojdata files. Might be worth a look. It didn't work for us and we lose about 1 hour a week on average because of lost intellesense on small to big projects (some with 3rd party controls, others not) Cheers, Simon sig ::
"Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie.... Study computers instead.", Jackie Chan on career choices.
article :: animation mechanics in SVG blog:: brokenkeyboards
"Most of us are programmers, but a few use VB", Christian Graus

Member 96

I used to do that in visual studio 6 with c++ when it's intellisense database would break (now that I think about it this has been a pretty long standing problem), however in vs.net2003 with c# and VB.Net there isn't an ncb file to delete.

Member 96

Yeah, it's incredibly time consuming when it breaks for all sorts of reasons. The intellisense / autocomplete is just an out and out necessity these days the way everything is built on layers of objects. Between rebuilding to fix it, or closing and opening it or having to refer to the object browser to find the names of the things I can't remember it *easily* consumes an hour maybe two a week.

SimonS

We made the fatal error of using VSS for our source control, so the process of closing-down-vs-and-deleting-bin/objs can take up to 5 minutes a time. Times that a few times a day. X| I just wish there were viable alternatives. Been looking closely at Delphi2005. No definite opinion on it yet, but I want to like it. Very much. Cheers, Simon sig ::
"Don't try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie.... Study computers instead.", Jackie Chan on career choices.
article :: animation mechanics in SVG blog:: brokenkeyboards
"Most of us are programmers, but a few use VB", Christian Graus