Hi Dante,
Having the most commonly used members first would be very helpful. Can it be
based on the current programmer's most frequent use of members, or would it be
based on an analysis of all users? There are pros and cons to each option, I am
sure.
Regarding putting the most common ones first versus keeping the entire list in
alphabetical order, one idea is that when the user types the period ("."), the
list box could be set to the most common member (in its normal alphabetical
order) and a modifier could be used to jump between the most common members,
such as holding CTRL with down or up arrows to jump to the next most common
item lower or higher in the list. This way, no "star" or anything else would
have to be added to the list box entry -- The user is simply placed on the most
common method and CTRL+UP and CTRL+DOWN jump to the other most common items,
while regular DOWN and UP step through all available items.
Thanks,
Joe
Joseph Drenth
Senior R&D Software Engineer
JBT Corporation | Automated Systems
400 Highpoint Drive
Chalfont, PA 18914, USA
E: joe.drenth@xxxxxxxx P: 215 822 4457
www.jbtc-agv.com
-----Original Message-----
From: program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:program-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Dante Gagne
Sent: Monday, November 5, 2018 2:48 PM
To: program-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [program-l] Opinion on Visual Studio code completion experience
**This email is from an external sender**
Hey folks,
First off, if folks think this is an inappropriate use of the list, just say so
and I'll take it offlist and apologize up front. However, I was hoping I could
ask the crowd for a few opinions now and then for functionality that we're
considering in the upcoming version(s) of Visual Studio. Essentially, I have my
guesses that this experience would work, but I'd rather YOU folks tell me that
it does.
Today when you're coding in Visual Studio, when you hit "." After a token, the
Intellisense completion list comes up with every single possible token that
could follow. So, if you type "Debug.", you'll get "Assert, AutoFlush,
Close,..." etc... (To be clear, you get a list box with each of these as an
entry in it, so you'd hit arrow key to travel through).
The new feature, uses machine learning to "guess" what is most commonly used.
For instance, for most folks, Debug.Write or Debug.WriteLine is the most common
completion. The feature will move those items to the top of the list. However,
since they're out of alphabetical order, they are annotated to show that these
are "recommended" instead of in the "everything" list.
If we did nothing, when you type Debug. You would hear "Write, Writeline,
Assert, Autoflush", etc... But in that case, you don't know which ones are
recommended, just that they're the first ones.
The question I have is this... how would you feel if the recommended
completions were preceded with the word "Star"? So, if I went this way, you'd
type "Debug" and hear "Star Write, Star Writeline, Assert, Autoflush...". The
first suggestion that was made was to say "Recommended", but that's four
syllables and I asserted that a screen reader user would go crazy having to sit
through hearing "Recommended Recommended Recommended..." over and over. But
"Star" is very quick.
We had also thought about putting it after the token so you'd here "Write Star,
Writeline Star, Assert, Autoflush" but the thought there was that "Write Star"
sounds an awful lot like the name of the method is literally "WriteStar".
How do folks feel about this? Is "Star" short enough that saying it before the
recommended items (of which there usually aren't more than 2-3)? Some other
suggestion?
Thanks in advance, and again, I do apologize if this is out of line for the
mailing list. Just let me know.
-Dante
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