Today is the fifth day of Diduary. You can see links to all of the published articles in the series here.

This might be the shortest article in my Diduary series, but it might also be the one that saves you the most time. It’s about Intellisense in Visual Studio.

I’m sure that there have been times where you needed to see the code that gets hidden when Intellisense pops its valuable little box up for you. You generally see something like this after you start typing in Visual Studio:

You can see, though, that the line of code below where I am typing is obscured by the Intellisense box. There’s an incredibly simple way to see “through” this box, without our typical behavior, which is to click out of Intellisense, read the text, and then backspace and retype to get the box to show up again. The answer:

The left Ctrl key. That’s it.

Give it a try the next time you’re writing some code. Your Intellisense box will look something more like this:

Hopefully, this will save you thousands of clicks and wear & tear on your backspace key. This works in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. See you tomorrow!