IDE Improvements in Visual Studio 2015

Microsoft has released the latest version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2015 Preview on November 12, 2015 at Visual Studio Connect() in New York, USA. So the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of Visual Studio 2015 has been significantly improved over the experience in Visual Studio 2013. So in this release of Visual Studio, C# and Visual Basic code improvements are focused on new templates available to create empty shared projects for Visual C#, VB.NET and JavaScript. These shared projects can now be referenced by several project types, like the following:

• Any un-flavored Visual C#/VB.NET projects, like Desktop Application, Class Libraries and Console Application as well.

• Windows Phone Silverlight 8.0/8.1

• Windows Store 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 using C#/VB/JavaScript.

If we want to add/remove the references from shared projects, we can do it via the Reference Manager, on the Shared Projects tab in Visual Studio 2015. The shared project reference shows up under the References node in the Solution Explorer, but the code and assets in the shared project are treated as if they were files linked into the main project.

• Syntax Highlighting
• Visual Studio IntelliSense
• Error in Visual Studio 2015
• Code Fixes and Refactoring

Syntax Highlighting

Basically syntax highlighting is the feature of Visual Studio that has been available for more than a decade. Now a big improvement in this new IDE is colorizing tooltip. As we know Visual Studio automatically creates collapsible regions for language constructs, such as classes and a methods body. On a collapsed body, either of classes or methods enable us to hover over them to see the hidden code in a tooltip in colorful code. Before Visual Studio 2015 these tooltip codes was shown in a single color. But now it displays as an actual code color. Let us see a programming view of colorized tool tip.


Visual Studio IntelliSense

In the new IDE of Visual Studio 2015, combined IntelliSence will be shown in the code editor. An IntelliSense item that exists in one framework, but not in another will be listed in the IntelliSense with a warning sign. The IntelliSense tooltip indicates which framework supports it and which framework doesn't. To know about the supporting framework, we hover the mouse over the IntelliSence then a tooltip will be shown that describes the supporting framework in details. Let's see it with a program example.