his article assumes you are familiar with Visual Studio .NET 1.0 and it presents only the new features of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of Visual Studio .NET 1.1, for both C# and Visual Basic .NET. J# is not discussed because it was not part of Visual Studio .NET 1.0. In the interest of space, some minor cosmetic changes (such as reorganization of the Start page) are not listed.
The changes and innovations from Visual Studio .NET 1.0 to Visual Studio .NET 1.1 are mostly improvement to the overall development experience and automating routine activities such as implementing an interface or events. Visual Studio .NET 1.1 also introduces new capabilities such as build events and specifying supported runtime versions.
IntelliSense Enhancements
IntelliSense gets a boost with Visual Studio .NET 1.1, with many new features and capabilities. These features are clearly aimed at automating mundane programming tasks and have nothing to do with the new .NET 1.1 runtime.
IntelliSense History. Visual Studio .NET 1.1 keeps track of the most frequently used methods or properties of any type you interact with during code writing. When you type the dot (“.”) character to de-reference a type member, IntelliSense will suggest the member you are most likely to choose based on your history of using this type. If you start typing the member prefix, IntelliSense will refine its suggestion but still base it on history. For example, consider the Trace class, defined in the System.Diagnostics namespace. The Trace class is used to trace some information using the WriteLine() static method:
Trace.WriteLine("I am here");WriteLine() writes the content of the trace message to the Output window and appends a new line feed. The Trace class has a method called Write() that does not append the line feed, so you are far less likely to use it. In Visual Studio .NET 1.0, if you were to type “Trace.w” then IntelliSense would suggest Write() instead of WriteLine(), because it is first alphabetically. In Visual Studio .NET 1.1, if you use WriteLine() more frequently that you use Write(), then IntelliSense will suggest WriteLine() instead (see Figure 1).
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C# Automatic Event Hookup and Handler Generation .NET delegate-based events are a type safe way to connect an event publisher to an event subscriber. Because the exact signature of the event handling method is known, IntelliSense can generate the code creating a new delegate object targeting the event handling method, and even the event handling method itself. For example, consider the MyPublisher class, which is used to publish events to interested subscribers about changes to the value of some number: Suppose the class MySubscriber wants to subscribe to the event in the class constructor. When you type the += operator to assign into a delegate, IntelliSense will preset a ToolTip offering to add a new delegate of a matching type by pressing the Tab key. If you do not like the default target method name you can simply type a different method name in its place. If the target method does not exist, IntelliSense will offer to generate a handling method by that name by pressing the Tab key once more. This sequence is presented in Figure 3. This IntelliSense support only works with delegates defined as events (not mere delegates). Also worth mentioning is that there is no IntelliSense support for removing a subscription:
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