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

I only recently discovered this tip, but it has changed the way that I work in Visual Studio 2010. If you’ve ever started typing something that doesn’t exist yet, it can be quite a difficult challenge to get that text into your code. For example, if I wanted to refer to a class, Area, before I’ve created that class. (Those of you using TDD know this happens often.) Here’s what traditional Intellisense does for me:

When I press the Space key, it will automatically fill in the selected value, even if that’s not what I want. Frustrating AND annoying. In Visual Studio 2010, you can change how this works!

There’s a new mode for Intellisense, called Completion Mode. You can change it here (or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Space):

Instead of having to use the Intellisense recommendations, I also have the ability to just use the stuff that I typed. Here’s my example from earlier with Completion Mode on:

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Hopefully this little tip will save you some time and frustration. I know it has for me.

If you’d like more helpful tips about Visual Studio 2010, check out my friend Zain Naboulsi’s blog. He’s writing a “Tip of the Day” for VS 2010 every day!