Hiding VS.NET 2005 Options?

About two years ago, I blogged about that stupid (IMHO) setting for VS.NET 2003 that would hide "advanced" members from intellisense in VB.NET. In VS.NET 2005, this option is not only off by default, but the checkbox is disabled. Nice.

But wait! I was trying to install a VS.NET 2005 add-in today and couldn't find a particular option in VS.NET 2005. I went through all of the options listed (the list seemed a little "light") and could not find what I was looking for.

Then I noticed that little checkbox at the bottom of the dialog: Show All Settings. Why in the world would that be turned off?!! Who decides when an option for configuring VS2005 doesn't need to be shown? And if I'm looking for an option, how do I know I need to turn on that little setting? I'm probably blowing this out of proportion but I think these little options to "hide" or "not show" everything that is available is counter-intuitive.

Needless to say, I checked the box and my list of options suddenly became much larger and I found the option I was looking for. I just hate that I had to waste five or ten minutes blindly clicking around trying to see something that wasn't even there!

5 Comments

  • I'm using C# development... where do I check that all members are shown in the Intellisence?



    I'm with Raj, everything is shown and no "Show All" checkbox. I'm using the Software Developer flavor.



    Chuck

  • You know -- I believe my first VS.NET 2005 project was a VB.NET project so I probably picked the "VB" environment option during setup.



    That might be why the options dialog was "dumbed down"...

  • This is the same with Visual CSharp express edition. Don't know why they did this. For some reason they decided that by default a developer isn't interested in a RELEASE/DEBUG build option :)

  • That was really funny and Helpful. Thank you

  • This dumbing down of VB.NET really bothers me. This seems to be an effort once again to make C# the professional's choice. Why are we going back there??? I've worked with C++ and VB and like most I feel most comfortable with whatever I'm working with at the moment, but I do feel VB.NET is more syntactically readable than C#.

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