Visual Studio 2010 Increased Productivity (ii)

You can say that the code Editor is the most important feature of all development experiences, after all, it lets you create, view, and change your code. There is no code editor, no other functionality in one IDE is mentioned, and the rest of the development environment is created around the editor.

Last week, we talked about the new features in 3 Visual Studio 2010: multi-monitor support, multi-targeting, and code navigation. This week I'd like to spend some time talking about the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 about the Code editor.

Improved Smart Tips

In some ways, a smart hint is a document that provides the type and the most convenient access to its members. Before there is a smart hint, development usually means you have to open your favorite class browser to help you find the type and type members you want. With a smart prompt, enter a period or use the shortcut key ctrl-j to eject any information you want to know about the type and its members.

In Visual Studio 2010, the improvement of the smart tip allows you to look up any substring in the type and its members, rather than in a strictly alphabetical order. As you can see below, when I enter "AIRCR", I get "aircraft" and "aircraftstatus" hints, and "Addtoaircraft" and other methods that contain this string but not the "AIRCR".

Smart Tips now also support looking for members through uppercase letters, so I can type "ATP" to find "addtopassengers", "Addtopassengerstatus" and "Addtopeople".