Hey All! My team builds Visual Studio IntelliCode and we're curious to learn how it's working for folks. In particular, are there any examples of contextual suggestions it provided that were really helpful and/or unexpected (in a good way!)? If so, I'd love to hear about it. If possible, it would be really fun if you could share a screenshot that helped illustrate your example within Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code 😊
Additionally, if you've encountered situations where the suggestions didn't seem quite right, or could have been more helpful, that would be extremely helpful to know about as well 👍
Top comments (17)
Hey Jonathan,
I've been using it since it was released. I like the fact you can train it based on your projects. That is a really great feature. I've been a long time user of Visual Studio so I am used to IntelliSense which has always been helpful as well as the shortcut keys that allow you to show suggestions as well as peek at method signatures.
Anyway, the fact that I can get project specific suggestions really does make my coding speedier (usually).
I can't really give a for instance, but I have used it a lot and yeah, nice job :).
Generally as a Microsoft Full Stack kind of guy, you cannot beat the proprietary tools, and so much innovation has been happening over the past couple of years, so excited for the future.
Thanks for the feedback! Out of curiosity: how often have you found yourself re-training the model on your own project? And has your team as a whole begun using the project-specific suggestions?
I've found myself putting off retraining because it takes a little time. I want to do it more often, but I wait until I hit a milestone because otherwise it interrupts my flow. I don't have a good sense of how important retraining is or how much difference it makes each time, but my completionist nature makes me uncomfortable when I know it's out of date. If it could happen in the background so I didn't have to think about it, that would reduce my mental load.
We’re actually working on support for automatic training, so it’s great to hear this would be valuable to you! Out of curiosity: what would be your ideal experience for training in the background? Periodically running on your local machine? Running as part of a CI/nightly build? Something else?
Also, have you tried sharing a custom model with your team as well? Or are folks individually training their local copies of the project?
I've not used it on any team projects, so I can't speak to that.
I don't know how valuable it is to retrain after small changes to the code. Obviously if small changes don't matter then it can be rarer, and if they do then it should be more frequent. I would like to feel like it's always up to date and Just Workstm without having to worry about that. To that end, I would like to have it updating on my local machine as changes happen, at whatever frequency makes sense.
I don't know what analysis is being done, but could it be iterative as changes happen or does it need to do a full rebuild every time?
My solution that comes in at around 5,000 lines takes about a minute to train. If that number is much larger for bigger solutions, then having the ability to train it on a server through CI or nightlies and pull it down from clients is important. I would like to see both workflows be supported and complementary.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing this detail! Would you be open to setting up a quick chat sometime this week? You’re giving some amazing feedback, and I know that our team would love to learn further about your experiences 😁 If so, feel free to ping me (joncart@microsoft.com) and we can go from there 👍
I'd be happy to, but I'm not sure that I have that much great insight. I've been using it casually on a medium sized personal project - a suite of Roslyn analyzers - but I've not thought about it in too much detail, other than what I've posted here. Would it be easier if I just keep posting things here when I think of them?
Sure! That would be great
I will do!
I have another scenario where I would have liked to have a suggestion.
I would like Intellicode to suggest
bar
here. On account of the matching name, type, common constructor patterns, and it being the only variable in scope, it should be confidently guessable. Currently I get no Intellicode suggestions in this position.With plain Intellisense, autocompleting in this position often leads to frustration. Hurrying through this process and using autocompletion I often accidentally end up with
this.Bar = this.Bar
by accident. That might be user error on my part, but it happens when I'm going fast. Having the sensible one suggested by Intellicode here could reduce my error rate significantly.Interesting! When you're typing this line fast, do you actually type
this.
after the=
, or is auto-completion suggesting that and making it easier to accidentally select it?Plain Intellisense is giving me
Bar
as an option, but I have my code style preferences set to preferthis.Bar
so it's getting automatically applied. I'm not typing thethis.
. Actually I just tried it again now and it's not happening, but it definitely does sometimes. That's something in my VS setup unrelated to Intellicode.The
this.
formatting isn't an issue. What matters is that I getBar
when I wantbar
. There's no bug there, it's just my own clumsiness navigating through the completion list, and sometimes typing fast and capitalising when I don't mean to. I'm badly coordinated, I mess up my typing quite a lot.bar
andBar
look very similar, and are very similar to type. I like my constructor parameters to have camelcase versions of property names. It's a common pattern but typo prone.If Intellicode always just immediately surfaced the correct one at the top of the list I wouldn't have the opportunity to make the typo, and that would be a quality of life improvement for me.
I don't know, but I guess that this could be quite a big issue for some dyslexic users.
I just wrote the following code
On the first line Intellicode suggested
DeclarationKind.Struct
. That was a good suggestion. On the second line it suggestedDeclarationKind.Struct
again. That's a bad suggestion because not only is it unlikely to be what I want to do, it would be unreachable code.I'd like to see it definitely not do it when it's unreachable. However, even if my
if
statement didn't return and the second case was reachable, I'd like Intellicode to guess that I'm unlikely to be repeating the same condition.DeclarationKind.Struct
could still be starred, but shouldn't be the top priority suggestion.If it could have seen that my "struct" string was a lowercase version of the name "Struct" and then suggested "class" because it's the lowercase version of "Class", that would be magic.
That’s great feedback! We currently take a lot of context into account when providing suggestions, but there’s still plenty of room to improve 👍 These are both good examples for us to use to iterate. Keep the feedback coming!
I'm liking it so far, but exceptions are an area where it could do better.
Take this simple example.
I didn't get any Intellicode suggestions as I wrote that. I would like to see it guess that I'm going to use an
ArgumentNullException
and guess thenameof(obj)
argument.It looks like the suggestions are all done in small units at the moment, but it would be nice if the whole of
throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(obj));
could be offered as a single suggestion after I finished typing the if.Pushing that even further, it would be nice if it could recognise that guards are common, so that just pressing ctrl+space on the first blank line of the method offered me the whole line as a single suggestion.
I would also like to see it train continuously in the background so that I don't have to think about retraining.
Seems like a cool tool. Let me try. For those of you who are trying to install on VSCode, you can find the extension here
Definitely let me know how it goes if you get a chance to try it out 👍