Microsoft IntelliCode

Microsoft IntelliCode enhances the standard IntelliSense experience in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code by using AI to provide more contextually relevant code completions and development assistance.

Key Features

• AI-Assisted Completions: Goes beyond alphabetical listings, suggesting the most likely members based on your current coding context, trained on thousands of open-source GitHub repositories.
• Argument Completions: Helps complete entire argument lists for function calls.
• Code Examples (for C# in Visual Studio): Shows real-world API usage examples from GitHub directly in the IDE.
• Team Completions: Allows training custom models on your own codebase to get suggestions tailored to your team’s patterns and libraries (requires Visual Studio Enterprise for training).
• Refactoring Suggestions: Can identify opportunities for refactoring.
• Style and Formatting Analysis: Learns your code formatting and style from your codebase.

Use Cases

• Improving coding speed and accuracy in Visual Studio and VS Code.
• Discovering APIs and learning how to use them correctly through examples.
• Enforcing consistent coding patterns within a team (with team completions).
• Making IntelliSense more intuitive and less noisy.

Pros

• Seamlessly integrated into Visual Studio and VS Code.
• Free for most individual use cases.
• Context-aware suggestions are genuinely helpful and often more relevant than standard IntelliSense.
• Team completions feature is powerful for organizations.

Cons

• Full capabilities (like team model training) might require specific Visual Studio versions (e.g., Enterprise).
• Primarily focused on languages well-supported by Visual Studio/VS Code (C#, C++, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java).
• The “AI” is more focused on statistical likelihood from learned patterns rather than generative AI like Copilot.

Getting Started

IntelliCode is often included by default in recent versions of Visual Studio. For Visual Studio Code, it can be installed as an extension from the Marketplace. Ensure it’s enabled in your IDE settings.

In Summary: Microsoft IntelliCode is a valuable enhancement to the built-in code completion features of Visual Studio and VS Code, making developers more productive by providing smarter, AI-powered suggestions based on common practices and optionally, their own team’s code.