Visual Studio IntelliCode supports more languages and learns from your code

Mark

December 5th, 2018

At Build 2018, we announced Visual Studio IntelliCode, a set of AI-assisted capabilities that improve developer productivity. IntelliCode includes features like contextual IntelliSense code completion recommendations, code formatting, and style rule inference.

IntelliCode has just received some major updates that make its context-sensitive AI-assisted IntelliSense recommendations even better. You can download the updated IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio and IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio Code today! The Visual Studio extension already works with the newly-release Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1.

AI-assisted IntelliSense recommendations based on your language of choice

Many of you have requested IntelliCode recommendations for your favorite languages. With this update, we’re excited to add four more languages to the list that can get AI-assisted IntelliSense recommendations. In our extension for Visual Studio, C++ and XAML now get IntelliCode alongside existing support for C#. In our extension for Visual Studio Code, TypeScript/JavaScript and Java are added alongside existing support for Python.

We’ll be sharing more details about IntelliCode’s support for each language on their respective blogs [C++ | TypeScript and JavaScript | Java]

AI-assisted IntelliSense for C# with recommendations based on your own code

Until now, IntelliCode’s recommendations have been based on learning patterns from thousands of open source GitHub repos. But what if you’re using code that isn’t in that set of repos? Perhaps you use a lot of internal utility and base class libraries, or domain-specific libraries that aren’t commonly used in open source code, and would like to see IntelliCode recommendations for them too? If you’re using C#, you can now have IntelliCode learn patterns and make recommendations based on your own code!

When you open Visual Studio after installing the updated IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio, you’ll see a prompt that lets you know about training on your code, and will direct you to the brand new IntelliCode page to get started. You can also find the new page under View > Other Windows > IntelliCode. Once training is done, we’ll let you know about the top classes we found usage for, so you can just open a C# file and start typing to try out the new recommendations. We keep the trained models secured, so only you and those who have been given your model’s sharing link can access them–so your model and what it’s learned about your code stay private to you. See our FAQ for more details.

Check out Allison’s video below to see how this new feature works.

Get Involved

As you can see, IntelliCode is growing new capabilities fast. Get the IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio and the IntelliCode Extension for Visual Studio Code to try right away, and let us know what you think. You can also find more details about the extensions in our FAQ.

IntelliCode and its underlying service are in preview at present. If you hit issues using the new features and you’re using Visual Studio, use the built-in Visual Studio “Report a Problem” option, and mention IntelliCode in your report. If you’re a Visual Studio Code user, just head over to our GitHub issues page and report your problem there.

If you want to learn more or keep up with the project as we expand the capabilities to more scenarios and other languages, please sign up for email updates. Thanks!