Visual Studio IntelliCode allows you to add the power of artificial intelligence to your code. Enabling IntelliCode is super easy, and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this.
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If you are a bit short on time, go and check out the video explainer on this topic.
This should get you up to speed quickly enough. If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to the channel and giving the video a thumbs up.
Visual Studio IntelliCode Explained
IntelliCode is a super exciting addition to Visual Studio. Microsoft calls it AI-assisted development. It will save you time by putting what you are most likely to use at the top of your completion list. These are displayed as starred recommendations.
IntelliCode uses open source GitHub projects with 100 stars or more to generate recommendations for your code. IntelliCode will also build a custom model to provide recommendations from your source code. These are things such as methods from your own classes or domain specific library calls.
Note: IntelliCode features are off by default. To enable these, go to Tools > Options > IntelliCode and enable the features.
This will enable IntelliCode for your project.
Install Visual Studio IntelliCode
If you don’t have IntelliCode installed, head on over to the Extensions > Manage Extensions window to download and install it.
After downloading, you will need to restart Visual Studio in order to install IntelliCode.
Building an IntelliCode Model
In Visual Studio 2019, hit Ctrl+Q and type IntelliCode into the search window. Select IntelliCode Model Management from the results or go to View > Other Windows > IntelliCode Model Management to access the Visual Studio IntelliCode window.
From here, you can build IntelliCode models for your projects. You can see the models shared with you, share the model you just built, retrain or delete the IntelliCode model.
Can I Use it in My Code?
At the time of this post, IntelliCode works in Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.8 and up) as well as Visual Studio 2019. It also supports the following languages:
- C#
- C++
- XAML (In Visual Studio 2019)
IntelliCode also works in Visual Studio Code and supports:
- Python
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Java
Microsoft is bringing the goodness of AI to Visual Studio Code. Now that is really neat!
View Extracted Data
After you have generated your model, you can head over to the following folder:
%TEMP%\Visual Studio IntelliCode
Here you should see a UsageOutput folder in one of the created folders. Look for a usage JSON file. This is the contents of the extracted data. Code analysis all happens client side. This data extraction is then fed into Microsoft’s Model Service which is uploaded to the service in the cloud.
It is important to note that Microsoft doesn’t receive any of your code. It only uploads data and information about your code. So your code remains on your machine.
Get the Source Code
If you want to grab a working example of the code used in this blog post, head on over to the following GitHub repo and clone the repo to your local machine.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to put those in the comments section below. Give it a try, and see what IntelliCode can do for you!