I've just noticed that sometimes a dotted white box that appears around variables while typing their name. What is this supposed to indicate? A quick Google only turned up lots of completely unrelated results
In the below image the cursor is at the end of StatusByte, which has just been typed in and which previously used a different name. The change is not done as a "Rename" (Ctrl+R, Ctrl+R) and the variable is not yet used anywhere else at this point. The box disappears, not when I move the cursor away, but when the cursor is moved elsewhere and typing begins.
I am using VS 2017 15.3.1, only having recently updated from a 15.2.x version. I don't think this was occurring in that previous version but may just not have noticed it. This shows in Visual Basic, I have not had chance to check with other languages yet.
This box appears while you are changing a variable, method, class or namespace name in Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017 for C# and Visual Basic.
(I have an extension that hides it: Plain Rename.)
Related
I have recently installed Visual Studio 15.3.1 Community Edition (although I suspect this affects all editions). When doing actions such as
closing SQL .sql file tabs
copying or renaming files
other actions which I can't pinpoint
Visual Studio will freeze or hang for a few seconds or permanantly. It sometimes displays "(Not Responding)" in the title bar, but not always. This is getting really frustrating.
It seems like the Visual Studio feedback system is at fault. Turning it off solved my problem.
Open Visual Studio
Navigate to Help > Privacy > Privacy Settings
Select the "No, I would not like to participate" radio button and click OK
Hopefully whatever bug is causing this issue will be fixed soon and I'll happily participate in the feedback program again!
See this issue posted a lot on the MS forums.
I struggled with it for a while. When editing XAML files, it would always freeze and hang.
Tried many solutions that didn't fixed it. Then, I found the solution that did fix it for me.
I made two changes at the same time, so I can't say for sure which one solved it, but I can guess.
First change, which probably isn't the fix, is that I added the registry keys from this page. They were missing on my system. Page has a lot of detail, but having those keys set properly can't hurt. I noticed in Process Monitor that it was missing on the following regkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Setup\CachePath
Second change I made, the one I'm guessing solved the issue, was deleting the 17k+ ".TRN" files inside the following directory:
%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VSApplicationInsights\
On my computer they were in something like the following:
C:\Users\Michael\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSApplicationInsights\vstelXXX_SOMEGUID
Going back to check now, and after three-or-so hours of work there's another 475 files in that folder. It's producing about four or five .TRN files a minute, all with encrypted data inside. Not going to speculate as to the purpose of it, but I doubt it's anything good or useful. Deleted all those, and the XAML editor in VS now works fine, or at least as well as it ever did. No more 30+ second hangs on a modern twentysome core workstation.
In the recent update of VS 2022, the program suddenly starts freezing (randomly) and the fix for me was to turn off inline hints (the thing that pops up when you double click Ctrl key).
I'm using VS for C++ so I turned it off for C++ specifically
Go to the Tools menu tab -> Options
I know this question was asked few times before but there is still no answer. Is there a way to make c++ editor behave like c# one so that it commits intellisense selection when I press spacebar? I've set member list to be aggressive and it works for all characters in "{}.,:;+-*/%&|^!=<>?##\ " except for space. I can commit with spacebar if I press ctrl+spacebar before but I want it to be more automatic, like in c#. I'm using VS2017 but in 2015 it's the same story.
Refer to your description, I tested it in my VS 2017 and got the same result as yours, I have reported it to the VS Product Team, please check this: VS 2017 > C++ > Intellisense: Committed by press the space bar not works even if set “Disable Aggressive Member List” to “True” and you can vote it or add your comments, then we need to wait for the response from the VS Product Team, thank you for your understanding.
When using debuggers (I'm using Visual Studio 2013 for this example), a variable window is often shown giving the names and values of variables in the current scope.
When a value is displayed for a class, it defaults to a format like this: {a=val1 b=val2 ...} which isn't always helpful when debugging.
Is there a way, such as operator overloading, that will let me choose what gets shown as a class' "value"?
I believe what you are looking for are Visualizers as long as you are using Visual Studio.
This website has a nice tutorial on them.
I have recently been exploring C++ some after using C# exclusively for quite awhile. I'm using Visual Studio 2013 and the one thing that is bugging me to death is the inability to commit an Intellisense suggestion by pressing the space bar. I have tried to edit the commit character list in Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Advanced to accept the space bar but so far I've had no luck. Coming from C# this is very aggravating. Does anybody know if it's possible to make such a change? I know I can use Tab or Enter, but in my opinion using Space is far more fluid.
Any information would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: Space seems to commit some suggestions but not others. if I type "std::stri", it commits "std::string". Unfortunately, Intellisense won't commit anything created by me or even common keywords. It just adds a space after what I already typed.
Further to my comment on your question, I have installed the trial version of Visual Studio 2013 (Ultimate), and can confirm that space bar does work to complete IntelliSense suggestions. Combining all comments, it would appear that it works in the following versions:
VS 2010
VS 2012
VS 2013
Here is a screenshot of my IntelliSense settings located at Tools > Options > Text Editor > C/C++ > Advanced:
As a last resort you may want to try changing all your settings back to default, as suggested in this answer:
Tools > Import and Export Settings > Reset all settings
UPDATE: After reading JoshC's comments, I have experimented a bit more and I get the problem too. It appears to be related to whether or not the item you are trying to autocomplete is a member of a type or namespace. If it is (e.g. std::string) then space will work. If it is not (e.g. void) then it will not work (but for some reason, tab will work). As per this link, you can manually invoke the "List Members feature" by pressing CTRL+J in which case on a blank line it will include items which are in the global namespace - however this is clearly not a practical solution.
I have no idea why it discriminates between space and tab in this way. If anyone is aware of a workaround please let me know and I will edit this answer again.
The following would seem to imply that there is no solution for C++:
http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2656132-support-committed-by-pressing-the-space-bar-in-c
When using Visual Studios 2012 for coding in C++, how do you autocomplete code selected in IntelliSense? (see comments)
I'm using VS2012 and I'm quite happy with it. But the problem is, whem I'm coding in C++, that the syntax highlighting is turning off an on all over again. Sometimes, the highlighting is off and I have to reload the file. Also, it highlighting is quite slow.
Does anyone know how to fix it?
I know this is a while ago but I have had this same problem appearing randomly until just now.
It would disable when the last line in a file was a single line comment. (// blah blah). As soon as i removed that the text highlighting worked again!
Edit: In this answer I assume that your problem description is correct. In other words, I'm assuming that occasionally C++ highlighting is working, and the other times the text appears as plain text: completely black and white.
My guess is you are using an extension which modifies or replaces the way Visual Studio highlights C++ code. Try temporarily disabling all of your extensions and checking again if the editor is working. Some extensions might have the Disable button disabled; in that case you'll need to uninstall the extension for this test (possibly through Control Panel → Programs and Features).
As an example of one common extension that completely replaces the C++ highlighter is Visual Assist. However, I do not personally use that product and I haven't heard of any specific problems with it of this nature. I am merely mentioning it as an example of an extension that completely changes the behavior of Visual Studio in regards to syntax highlighting of C++ code.
For me, highlighting always stops working when the first visible line in the editor begins with the characters '//' and I trigger reparsing somehow (CTRL + S for instance).
Highlighting always works fine when the first visible line in the editor begins with anything else, even with a whitespace, and I trigger reparsing somehow.
I could indent all my comments and never experience this problem, but now that I know about it, it's not so annoying anymore, so I let it be.
This is a bug in Visual Studio 2012:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/760154/syntax-highlighting-sometimes-not-working
If you're using only Intellisense, you may go to Edit->Intellisense->Toggle Completion Mode (or hit Ctrl + Alt + Space), play with it and see if it works (maybe you've pressed this combination of keys by accident).
I've also installed Update 3 and haven't had any problems since. Who knows..
I had the same problem. Disabling the extentions sadly did not work for me.
After searching around and realizing that it only happened on larger files,
I got it to work by turning harware acceleration off.
Tools->Options...->Environment->General
*Automatically adjust [...] (off)
*Use hardware graphics acceleration (off)
In my case, it turned out that a large block of code (a 200+ line method) was commented out with // starting in the first column, and this was causing the syntax coloring not to work. I changed the commenting delineation to /* ... */ for that method and all of the syntax coloring was fixed.
Personally, I found that things like:
#if 0// bla-bla
mess up syntax highlighting badly. The solution that works for is to put a space before a comment, like so:
#if 0 // bla-bla
I installed Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 yesterday and started experiencing the exact same behavior described in the original post. Based on some suggestions in this thread, I took at look at my extensions, and disabling AllMargins fixed the issue. I've since re-enabled AllMargins and everything appears to be working as it should.
Try disabling and re-enabling any of your extensions; hopefully that will fix the issue for you.