OmegaMan's Musings

(Update 4/27/2015 Added Asp.net intellisense failure)

I was running the latest version of Visual Studio 2013 and ran into the intellisense not automatically popping up when I would type a period. Now I could hit CTRL-J (list members) and it would pop up the list which showed me that it worked and was not dead per se, but I still did not have it automatically popup after typing a period. I was also running Visual Studio 2012 on the same box and it did not have the same problem; intellisense popped the list up on the period. I thought, “This ends here” and researched it. Here is what made it auto pop for me:

1. In quick launch type “Statement Completion” and choose the first one  “Text Editor -> All Languages -> General” to be taken to the options page for all languages.
2. On the general options page in the “Statement Completion” section override whatever is in the boxes “Auto list members” and “Parameter Information” and makes those checked. Such as shown here:

That brought back the auto popup for me in VS2013 and should for you as well.  This fix should work with any version of Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013.

Still having problems? Then see Using Intellisense on MSDN for other troubleshooting suggestions.

ASP.Net

It has been reported that ASP.Net users are experiencing a different kind of intellisense failure. If it is web related intellisense look into installing Visual Studio Web tools.  See

Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools 2013.1 for Visual Studio 2012

Call me crazy but I named my kids, I named my pets and heck, yes I even name my threads. Things which are important to me in life are worth naming; right? Thread names for me can be important in debug situations. When one uses the Performance Wizard and chooses to have a Concurrency Visualization profile report, specifically the Threads section the name of a thread is not used.

Historically and in the latest version of Visual Studio 2010 the profile reports do not show the thread names. Why?

Don’t get me wrong on this, Visual Studio Twenty Ten is a great product and light years ahead of all other versions! I look forward to having it share my cube and work computer for eight plus hours a day when it is finally released. But heck a man can dream can he?

Let us take a look at what inspires me to write this diminutive dissertation on a distilled user suggestion…

Premise

One can name threads, simply by, well naming it. Here is a code snippet below:

Thread T1 = new Thread(ThreadOne);

T1.Name = "Jabberwocky";

T1.Start();

Viola our thread is named. I cannot think of another reason for naming a thread except for debug purposes. Hey did someone mention debug?

Yep while debugging the nice little Threads window as shown above displays our named thread. But yet the Profile Performance reports do not show it. Are the two groups at Microsoft not talking to each other and sharing technology. ;-)

Heck I even tried a trick to Trojan Horse a name into the profiler (Reference the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Profiler dll located in the install directory at  \Team Tools \Performance Tools\)

Thread t = new Thread(new ParameterizedThreadStart(
threadIndex =>
{
    Microsoft.VisualStudio.Profiler.DataCollection.NameProfile(
        "Jabberwocky",
        Microsoft.VisualStudio.Profiler.ProfileLevel.Thread,
        Microsoft.VisualStudio.Profiler.DataCollection.CurrentId
        );

    Console.WriteLine("Hello from thread " + (int)threadIndex);
}));

alas to no avail. The report still only shows the type of thread and its generic ID.

Why?

I feel that named threads might give one an edge in debugging race or deadlock conditions in code. This is a great tool which frankly could be made even better by including the actual thread names, if found in the report.

Connect Suggestion

If you find this little diatribe interesting go and put your two cents into the Microsoft Connect issue which I created:

Named Threads: Missing the Obvious on Profile Reports

Thanks for your time and well; taking a second look.