While the majority of the work going into the Test Design Studio 3 (TDS3) rewrite has focused on reorganizing and updating the base code, we are still bringing some new features and usability enhancements.  One such area getting an update is the standard IntelliSense® member list.  This is the list that offers suggestions for language elements as you type.

In TDS 2.0 and prior releases, the member list would automatically highlight the item in the list that started with the text you were typing.  So if you typed “date”, your member list might look like the following in TDS 2.0:

This works great if the member you are looking for starts with the word “Date” like “DateAdd”, “DateDiff”, etc.  This technique, however, is not useful for finding other date-related functions like “FormatDateTime” where the matching text is not at the beginning of the term.

With TDS3, your member list might look like this:

This list shows you exactly what you are looking for!  It includes all the known functions that include the text “date”.  In particular, we can discover the functions “CDate”, “FormatDateTime”, and “IsDate” that were not easily found in the old-style member list.  The list even highlights the search term within the list so you can easily determine why that item is being matched.  The list also auto-filters to the matched entries, so you no longer see the entries that are not a match.

This enhancement will make it that much easier for you to find exactly what you need in the member list.  This new member list does not stop there… you can also match items based on partial matches.  For example, if you were searching for “DateDiff”, you could use a shorthand notation of “dd” (e.g. each capital letter in the name) to return the function as well.

This list automatically matches on “DateDiff” because of the use of capital letters in the name, but you will also see that it matches on “DateAdd” because it also contained the two “d” characters.

While it may not seem like much, these little changes can have a big impact on your ability to discover what you need and increase your efficiency while writing code.