Microsoft has announced the general availability of Visual Studio IntelliCode, its AI-supercharged tool that gives you contextual IntelliSense recommendations powered by a machine learning model trained on thousands of open source repositories.

It was at last year's Build that we first heard of IntelliCode, which essentially applies machine learning to the features we already have in Visual Studio, such as code formatting and style rule inference, see The AI In The IDE - IntelliCode In Visual Studio. Moreover the news that is included in Visual Studio 2019, version 16.1 makes good on a promise made last June by John Montgomery, Director of Program Management for Visual Studio, see Visual Studio 2019 Will Include IntelliCode. 

If you are already using the Visual Studio 2019 Preview you'll find that the latest, third, release now has IntelliCode support by default for any workloads that support C#, C++, TypeScript/ JavaScript, or XAML.

However the latest announcement on the Visual Stuio blog from VS Platform Program Manager, Allison Buchholtz-Au also indicates that not everything is fully available as yet:

Only the C# and XAML models are currently generally available. C++ and TypeScript/JavaScript remain in preview at this time. 

The bog post also gives a "sneak peak" of a feature for automating repeated edits that is under development for inclusion in a future release of IntelliCode. 

Have you ever found yourself making a repeated edit in your code, for instance when you’re refactoring to introduce a new helper function? You might consider creating a regular expression search to find all the places in your code where the change is required – but that seems like a lot of work, so you resign yourself to the tedious and error prone task of going through the code manually. What if an algorithm could track your edits (locally of course), and learn when you were doing something repetitive like that after only a couple of examples? Repeated edit detection does just that, and suggests other places where you need that same change:

This does seem like a feature worth having.

Does IntelliCode mean that one day, thanks to machine learning, all the code we write will be perfect? Somehow I think not - but IntelliCode is a welcome help and in future we'll have to add a disclaimer to the effect of "any residual errors are my own."  

More Information

Announcing the general availability of IntelliCode

Related Articles

Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Online 

Visual Studio 2019 Will Include IntelliCode

The AI In The IDE - IntelliCode In Visual Studio

Visual Studio IntelliCode Infers C# Coding Conventions

Visual Studio Java Gets IntelliCode 

Visual Studio Python Gets AI-Based IntelliCode  

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