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Visual Studio IntelliCode

dirkstrauss.com

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#41

I've never seen any IDE as good as IntelliJ IDEA when it comes to Auto suggest, and it has no real AI, just deterministic understanding of the project's source tree and dependencies, an indexed AST, how the type system works, and what's in scope at the cursor. In other words, two classes both called 'List' should not show up when I start typing 'List', if only one of them can possibly be relevant in context. A lot of…

That isn’t how code competition is used. It is t about “saving on typing”, rather, it enables exploration and allows a developer to browse on what they can do next. In that case, your error rate is completely meaningless.

Especially it's a really good memory assistant if you switch between languages often.

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#42
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If suggestions are to be made i'd rather have them be made by the designers of the APIs/languages, especially those are have been around for some time and have developed better approaches for doing things already possible previously but in a worse way. For example imagine you have an API that Foos Stuff, the initial version could have been FooStuff but it turned out that after 10 years of active use, the approach was…

Isn't that what the Obsolete attribute is for? Or similar attribute/test driven enforcement of migration to new approaches. It mines your own codebase, not public ones.

Yes, but it isn't enough information and TBH i do not think that at the language level you can have something that will provide a good enough UX (but then again i'm not in favor of Javadoc-style comments and i believe documentation should lie outside of the source code).

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#43

I've never seen any IDE as good as IntelliJ IDEA when it comes to Auto suggest, and it has no real AI, just deterministic understanding of the project's source tree and dependencies, an indexed AST, how the type system works, and what's in scope at the cursor. In other words, two classes both called 'List' should not show up when I start typing 'List', if only one of them can possibly be relevant in context. A lot of…

That isn’t how code competition is used. It is t about “saving on typing”, rather, it enables exploration and allows a developer to browse on what they can do next. In that case, your error rate is completely meaningless.

Really it's both, and IntelliJ is the best in the world at supporting both modes. What you're "probably" going to type is at the top of its autocomplete list, but you can still browse through an alphabetical list of what you "could" type below that.

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#44

I read that page, watched the vid, and really don't understand what the benefits of this are. Currently use ReSharper and it seems to do a pretty awesome job of predicting what I want. Whoever is promoting this needs to give better examples...

It's looking at github projects with more than 100 stars: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/ I guess everybody is wondering why this even exists. Sounds like a typical "solution in search of a problem" to me, and it probably only got green-lit because it mentioned "AI" in the pitch deck ;)

Have you actually used it, or are you judging purely based on speculation?

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, isn't the whole point that intellicode is trained on your own project? Intellicode may also be trained on your own project but that's definitely not its whole point. Here's an excerpt from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/ : >"IntelliCode recommendations are based on thousands of open source projects on GitHub each with over 100 stars." Perhaps you were thinking of "IntelliSense" instead of…

Huh, weird. I've only ever noticed the "starred" recommendations on our own methods, and it's incredible.

The biggest place I see a lot of great IntelliCode recommendations so far is React development in Typescript in VS Code.

    class ComponentName extends React.|
The top completions in order at that point are Component and PureComponent. It feels more magical than I would have expected, and it is particularly great having that constant reminder of PureComponent, which is very similar to the Now/UtcNow example above.

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#46
post #32

They call it AI, it all looks cool and shiny, but I remember that Visual Studio 2010 was using usage stats already to make auto-complete more useful. Then I think either 2013 or 2015 canned that approach and reverted to a dumb auto-complete (and was a major regression in term of UX). This is merely re-introducing something that already existed.

IntelliCode does give a better UX/feature set than what was ever in previous Visual Studio versions, however. The IntelliCode suggestions have a star icon to make it clearer why they bubbled to the top. The Visual Studio version of IntelliCode supports manually training the suggestions for C# (and soon other languages, if I recall) on personal/corporate/private projects and sharing the subsequent AI/usage models with team members. That ability to get all of a team on a similar model for usage/context-aware suggestions alone will be a big deal for some projects.

(Also, it's built on "AI" techniques like convolutional neural networks rather than pure usage statistics databases, so the performance characteristics are also much better than the past Visual Studio usage databases, especially on machines where it can hardware accelerate it, which supposedly on Windows 10 is most GPUs these days.)

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#47

>In Visual Studio 2019, hit Ctrl+Q nope. Who picked this shortcut?

Because Windows has been consistent with Alt+F4 (and Alt+F,X in traditional menu apps, and Alt+Space,C for old fogeys that still use the classic "command menu" even as its icon/click-region continues to disappear from title bars) for decades and "Exit" (or "Close") generally being the Windows command word of choice over "Quit", Ctrl+Q has never meant cohesively "Quit" on Windows as it does on other platforms. I know a lot of Windows applications that use Ctrl+Q for various things having nothing to do with quitting (and Windows-focused Vim users that use/suggest Ctrl+Q for `` for similar reasons).

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#48

I've never seen any IDE as good as IntelliJ IDEA when it comes to Auto suggest, and it has no real AI, just deterministic understanding of the project's source tree and dependencies, an indexed AST, how the type system works, and what's in scope at the cursor. In other words, two classes both called 'List' should not show up when I start typing 'List', if only one of them can possibly be relevant in context. A lot of…

[deleted]

Re: Visual Studio IntelliCode

#49
post #34
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter if it's 99.9% accurate, it's the 0.1% failure rate that will prevent adoption. Perfectly said. I've always thought the same way. Basically, I'd rather not use a "pretty good" auto complete, because "pretty good" usually means it does more harm than good (where harm is providing wrong results or doing anything that slows me down overall).

See: Every phones autocorrect and how much annoyance they cause.

Especially when a common word is missing in the dictionary for some ducking reason.
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