Visual Studio IntelliSense Not Working? What To Do.
There are certain tools that have become indispensable for developers in this day and age. These tools often start as “nice-to-haves” but quickly graduate to “must-haves” due to the benefits they provide. Once you get used to relying?on them, it’s terribly frustrating when you’re prevented from using them for some reason. And there’s a very specific tool in that category I want to talk about today. It’s called Visual Studio IntelliSense.
This intelligent code completion tool present in Visual Studio is definitely a must-have for a .NET developer. The .NET Framework BCL (Base Class Library) is just too large for a human?brain to grasp. There’s no way you could remember all those classes, interfaces, and methods. Being able to put a period after some variable and get a nice list of all the possible members you can call isn’t only a nicety: it’s a survival need. So, what to do when you need Visual Studio IntelliSense but, for whatever reason, it’s not working? That’s what this post is about.
We’ll start out by doing a quick overview of Visual Studio IntelliSense. We’ll cover a little bit of history, plus a few definitions, so you can grasp why this tool is more than a simple autocomplete. Then we’ll proceed to cover the different solutions you can try to get you out of this nightmarish scenario.
We’ll then close the post with quick advice on how to get IntelliSense to work for your own classes and types.