Shhh. I recently rebuilt this laptop and haven’t yet installed Visual Studio and when (if?) I do Intellisense will be the first thing I switch off. My somewhat radical opinion is that Intellisense and similar facilities in Eclipse etc, are a mental crutch which I’d rather not get dependent on. Similarly I have certain phone numbers that I insist on entering by hand for mental exercise. I can easily recall those few, whereas others that I dial every day directly from the phone’s memory are simply missing from my mind. I’m in good company though, Charles Petzold writes in Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?:
Visual Studio can be one of the programmer’s best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio’s insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our programming intelligence rather than augmenting it? This talk dissects the code generated by Visual Studio; analyzes the appalling programming practices it perpetuates; rhapsodizes about the joys, frustrations, and satisfactions of unassisted coding; and speculates about the radical changes that Avalon will bring.
