Shaykatc's WebLog

VS 2003 Tip #5: Intellisense in the immediate window

Ok, one other new feature we added was to add intellisense to the immediate window.

The immediate window is a window used to evaluate expressions, much like the VB6 one. When debugging and in break mode, you can open it up from Debug->Windows->Immediate. Then type in the expression you need evaluated and voilà, it returns values. Ok, one of the big changes in Everett was that we added intellisense dropdowns to the immediate window so you could just type for e.g. this. and then get a nice dropdown to see the members on the object. So you don't have to type into the watch window to see evaluations, or mistype into it by mistake.

Which brings me to another feedback point. How important is this to you, Mr. C# Developer? VB.NET was the primary customer for this feature in VS2003 - do you happen to use this also? Anyone? Let us know.

 

Published Monday, March 01, 2004 10:55 PM by shaykatc

Comments

 

Anand said:

Being an ex VB developer I missed having intellisense in the Immediate windows, even when coding in C#...:-)
March 1, 2004 11:12 PM
 

im said:

Take it out! Dont you know that use of an interactive debugger is an admission of failure to any self-respecting C# programmer!? :-)
March 1, 2004 11:54 PM
 

James aka Mr. C# Developer said:

I use the immediate window every day and so do most of my co-workers (although for some odd reason intellisense has stopped working for one guy).

Having intellisense, even if it is just to create little statements in the immediate window, is great. Now all we need is stop and go debugging *hint hint*

:)
March 1, 2004 11:55 PM
 

Lonnie McCullough said:

Hmmm....well I'm a C++ developer and I would love to have a feature like this. I can only wonder at its greatness tho. I just hate having to cut and paste long expressions (mostly local variable names) from my source code into the immediate window in VC++ so I can imagine that this must work wonders for one's sex life (giving developers more time for those types of activities).
March 2, 2004 12:50 AM
 

Simon Smith said:

I use it quite a lot - especially when I'm learning about a bit of the framework new to me, or a 3rd party app of some kind. Very useful!
March 2, 2004 2:10 AM
 

SimonT said:

I dont use the Immediate window as my memory isnt that good, I would love to have intelli-crack everywhere.
March 2, 2004 2:17 AM
 

Omer van Kloeten said:

I always use it. It's something I missed a lot in VS.NET 2002 since I moved from VB6 to C#.
I still use and love it, but what I'm getting in my working environment is that about 30% of programmers use the Immediate window and 70% use Watch windows.
March 2, 2004 4:18 AM
 

milbertus said:

I'm definitely liking the Immediate window. I'm not totally in the habit of using it yet, but when I do remember to use it, it's a lot more convienent than using the Watch window for this sort of thing.
March 2, 2004 4:47 AM
 

Matt Hawley said:

I completely agree, I use it all the time and want to see it in future versions.
March 2, 2004 4:57 AM
 

Michael Giagnocavo said:

I use it in about 70% of my debugging sessions. Sometimes it's not capable of doing what I want (method evaluation doesn't seem to work very well), but it looks like Whidbey's on the right track.
March 2, 2004 5:27 AM
 

Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP] said:

I enjoy the immediate window from VB6, but I find the one for the VS.NET environment lacking, at best. The evaluation expression doesn't seem to be very good (as one other poster said), and I miss the ability to cut and paste within the same window.

Basically, I liked the fact that the VB6 version was like a magic notepad. I could cut and paste at will. I don't like cycling through what I had when I press the up arrow key.

However, the inclusion of intellisense will have me give the feature a second try.

Overall though, I prefer to use the watch window because of these omissions.
March 2, 2004 6:22 AM
 

Jean-Claude Manoli said:

I use and love the Immediate window, even more now that it has intellisense.
March 2, 2004 7:37 AM
 

Sherrod said:

Intellisense for the C# immediate window would be great.

I'm working on a huge solution, and the compile-and-run cycle on my machine usually takes about 2 minutes (I timed it at 5 minutes 30 seconds when I changed some code in the bottom layer).

In other words, recompiling is *extremely* expensive in terms of time. When I'm trying to figure out vaguely documented framework classes and methods (XML parsing and WMI come to mind), the immediate window lets me figure out the framework items in question by trying different things on our data without the expensive recompile.

Now if we only had edit-and-continue, I could tweak the visual look of a custom control in the bottom layer of our app, and see how it looked in our app without the 5-minute recompile-and-run cycle.
March 2, 2004 8:05 AM
 

dr.u said:

holy crickey, I was late to the party on that feature. Being a web app developer I am not sure how to best use it but it seems quite sexy.
March 2, 2004 10:56 AM
 

Frank Hileman said:

I use it all the time!
March 2, 2004 1:16 PM
 

Sean said:

I love this feature. Now PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE add edit and continue to C# like VB.NET team is doing!!! Just tell the product manager "ROI and TCO." ;-)
March 2, 2004 3:30 PM
 

WeirdFish said:

I frequently use it. In fact, I've got so used to intellisense that I get disappointed when it doesn't work when I'm typing in the watch window :-)
March 3, 2004 5:55 AM
 

Anonymous said:

"Just tell the product manager "ROI and TCO." ;-) " -- now that would probably matter if they ate their own dog food and used VS.NET to build anything beyond trivial quickstart examples.
March 4, 2004 4:11 AM
 

MavFeed@sdbn.co.uk (Mavrick) said:

Are you Kidding! This feature is great, saves a lot of time and effort. I was glad not to lose this when I moved from VB to C#.
March 8, 2004 3:39 AM
 

Rick Byers said:

I would find this incredibly usefull, except that property evaulation / method invocation is very likely to cause debugger deadlocks inside my app (perhaps due to our heavy use of AppDomains?).

Microsoft support says this is a known issue and has been fixed in Whidbey. Since it does work fine 75%-90% of the time, I still occasionally risk using it when necessary - it is still an invaluable feature! I just wish there was a hotfix for this bug so that I could actually rely on this feature on a regular basis.
March 8, 2004 10:43 AM
 

J.T said:

Any way to get the immediate window to understand cast objects?
March 8, 2004 4:39 PM
 

Avner Kashtan said:

I use both the Watch Window and the Immediate Window together, interchangibly. The Watch window is good when I want to, umm, WATCH something. The immediate window is for when I want to get at properties nested deep inside - I use it *because* of the Intellisense.

In short, anything that has intellisense is good and will be used, end of story. :)
March 14, 2004 12:02 AM
 

Code/Tea/Etc... said:

March 14, 2004 5:00 AM
 

Code/Tea/Etc... said:

March 14, 2004 5:03 AM
 

lys rian said:

This feature was a welcome surprise, please keep it around.

~Ms. C# developer
;)
March 24, 2004 12:41 PM
 

Code/Tea/Etc. said:

August 25, 2004 6:17 AM
 

Relationship Compatibility said:

Ok, one other new feature we added was to add intellisense to the immediate window. The immediate window is a window used to evaluate expressions, much like the VB6 one. When debugging and in break mode, you can open it up from Debug->Windows->Immediate

June 7, 2008 10:11 PM
New Comments to this post are disabled

This Blog

Syndication

© 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use  |  Trademarks  |  Privacy Statement
Microsoft
Page view tracker