Monday, May 9, 2016

Adventures in Visual C#

Dear Microsoft,

When I'm typing, if I finish the word that I wanted, I hit space bar without thinking. It's really a bitch that spacebar also happens to tell intellisense that instead of what I typed, insert the selected code. Same goes for typing "." . It would be nice if instead of intellisense deciding that my normal typing is me selecting options, there was a different key, one not used nearly as often during coding, that told intellisense I wanted to use that selection. That way when I'm looking at my notes instead of the code I'm typing, I'm not going to look back to check for errors and recognize exactly nothing of what I typed. I like intellisense reminding me which syntax is required for what language, because python, java, and C# all have different requirements and sometimes I forget which is which. But it's not worth it when I have to break the flow of my typing to NOT use intellisense. So I turn it off, and lose the use of one tool which makes Visual Studios so nice.

This message was inspired because I'm doing the Visual C# Basics course through Microsoft's virtual academy. During lesson 10, there's one line that says:

char[] messageArray = message.ToCharArray();

Every time I typed "message." in the second part of the line, it changed what I typed to messageArray. So when I looked back, I got

char[] messageArray = messageArrayToCharArray();

There was another part of his code where I would press space and end up with something I'd never seen before, because I'm not that far into the course. I turned off intellisense, so I can't really go through and find out what I typed and what I got. Throughout the lesson, fighting with intellisense about what I really meant to type cost me 10 minutes.

"." and " " are so ubiquitous throughout coding that they really shouldn't be keyboard shortcuts on their own. Maybe make it "ctrl + space", so that it's something relatively easy to type that won't be typed by accident.

Sincerely,
Someone Actually Using Your Stuff

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