The Catch Block #63 - Hooray for Visual Studio 2022!

As you might have seen, a preview for Visual Studio 2022 was released a few days ago:

I'm not normally the early-adopter type, but I love Visual Studio and this version is going to be 64-bit, so I jumped all over that preview and have been using it for a few days now. It is pretty dang seamless, especially for a preview, but there's one feature I want to point out that makes this worth your time to download and install: IntelliCode.

IntelliCode

In the MVC project I'm currently working on, a user can check on the status of up to four packages. We have a view model for this that looks like the following:

public class PackageRequestVM
{
    public string PackageNumber1 { get; set; }

    public string PackageNumber2 { get; set; }

    public string PackageNumber3 { get; set; }

    public string PackageNumber4 { get; set; }
}

Code is simplified for this demo.

I then needed, in my controller, to map these items to a List<string> object, which is what the lower-level method needed as a parameter. However, I only wanted to map them if they were not null or whitespace.

So I wrote out the first check:

When I started to write out the same code for the second package number, something amazing happened:

Visual Studio started correctly predicting the next lines of code that I wanted to write!

This is a new feature called IntelliCode, an AI-assisted predictive coding tool. You can read more about it here:

The suggestions IntelliCode provides appear as greyed-out text:

All you have to do is hit Tab, and Visual Studio inserts the suggested line for you!

This is awesome, and it's saving me a lot of time when writing slightly repetitive code like the sample above. Go get this preview and see for yourselves!