My love affair with Visual Studio: Error Correction

I have been working with Visual Studio for years, and I’ve found a few tricks along the way that make my coding easier. In this blog post I’ll show one of my favourite time savers the Error Correction feature.

When you are writing code for a form or a class as part of a team, or even if you are just starting work on a project which will be made up of multiple classes, you always end up having to reference classes, properties, or methods in your code that haven’t been written yet. So you either have to comment out those calls, add them later, or add stubs so your code will compile. In Visual Studio 2010 they added a neat little feature that will add the stubs for you!

Say I am writing code for a click event handler that will create and populate an instance of a Student object who will be registering for a course. I haven’t created the Student class yet so I see a squiggly under the word student and this little rectangle at the end of the squiggly.

Now comes the cool part, I can carefully hover the mouse over the tiny rectangle and a little warning symbol will appear, if I hover just right it will appear with an arrow beside it that I can click on.

Clicking on that little arrow will bring up a menu of options that will fix the error for me! By the way, if like me, you find using the mouse to bring up the list fiddly, you can use the keyboard to bring up the correction menu by putting the cursor on the word student and hitting CTRL + . that’s CONTROL KEY and a PERIOD.

Visual Studio is offering to create a Student class for me, or to define a new type (variable essentially). If I click on Generate ‘Class Student’ I can see a new class appear in Solution Explorer called Student.vb

If I open up the Student class I see it has not only created a class, but because my code called a constructor and passed in two variables, it created a constructor method in the class as well that accepts two variables!

The code isn’t complete by any means, but it’s enough to get rid of the squiggly on Student in my event handler!

Of course now I have squiggly lines under vFirstName and vLastName because I haven’t declared those yet, but if I bring up the Error Correction list for those variables I select Generate field for vFirstName and then Generate field for vLastName and it adds the declarations for me!

Sure, it didn't’ know what data type to make the variables, it’s not perfect, but when I am trying to test something quickly these little Error Correction tools that will generate code stubs for me can be a real time-saver.