The past couple weeks, we’ve been working hard on the implementation of IntelliPrompt parameter info, which will be added to the SyntaxEditor .NET Languages Add-on for WPF/Silverlight. This blog post gives a first glimpse at how the automated IntelliPrompt parameter info looks.
The parameter info UI will also be available for use by any other custom language implementations as well, and we’ll be adding new samples to show such usage. Without further ado, let’s see the new functionality as it is implemented for the .NET Languages Add-on.
Screenshots
This screenshot shows the parameter info displayed for a C# variable’s indexer. The variable is implicitly typed and resolves to List<int>. Note how both the documentation comments for the indexer and the documentation comments for the current parameter are displayed.
This screenshot shows a Console.Write method invocation in VB. Since no arguments have been typed it defaults to showing the first overload it found. However the up/down keys can be used to scroll between other overloads, or you can press the up/down arrow buttons on the tip itself to scroll.
We now type a first string argument and press comma. That changes the selected signature in the parameter info to be the one that best matches two parameters, where the first is a string. Since we’re typing the second argument, the second parameter is bolded in the tip as well.
In the next screenshot, we press Enter to move to the next line. Note how the parameter info moves down below the caret so that it doesn’t obscure the line that is being edited.
In this final screenshot we show how multiple forms of IntelliPrompt can display at the same time. We have a parameter info session open and press Ctrl+Space to get a completion list. The completion list pops up under the parameter info.
Summary
All of these updates add extremely helpful tips for your end users that will significantly improve their coding productivity. The updates are ready to go both in WPF and Silverlight for the 2011.2 releases of their respective suites, which should be in several weeks.