I have Visual Studio 2013 with no plugins or anything fancy. Whenever I'm coding, every so often (maybe once every half hour) intellisense randomly stops completing my sentences or popping up at all when I press Ctrl+Space.
I have tried Tools->Import and export settings->Reset all settings but it did not help. The issue came right back.
The only thing that solves it for me now is to close VS and reopen it. But as you can imagine, this is extremely frustrating.
I was having the same problem and this seemed to work for me.
Basically, go to Tools >> Options >> Text Editor >> All Languages >> General and make sure that both Auto list members and Parameter information are checked (not the half-checked/square state).
This is still happening in VS2013 update 4 (I have a WPF project using C#).
This was relatively easy to fix by closing then reopening the file not the whole project.
Looks like my issue cleared up after deleting the settings folder from my previous VS2010 installation. I followed the instructions here (Also applies to VS2013): http://www.haneycodes.net/visual-studio-2012-intellisense-not-working-solved/
In case URL breaks:
Open the start menu and type “%AppData%” and press enter to get to your Application Data Folder.
Either you were automatically placed in the “Roaming” folder or you weren’t. If you weren’t, go to the “Roaming” folder.
Open the “Microsoft” folder.
Open the “VisualStudio” folder.
Here you’ll see a folder titled “11.0” (the VS 2012 folder) and probably also “10.0” (the VS 2010 folder).
DELETE (or rename) the “10.0” folder. Note that you can now kiss your Visual Studio 2010 settings and preferences goodbye (your projects will be safe and sound).
DELETE (or rename) all other folders that are not the “11.0” folder, assuming you used to have Visual Studio 2008 or whatever.
Now restart Visual Studio 2012 and you should be good to go!
For me, Unloading and Reloading a project fixes MVC cshtml intellisense. Right-click project, click Unload. Right click grayed out project, click Reload.
Just to be clear, this problem only happens to me when in C# MVC views, only when checked into TFS.
I have also submitted this as a bug to Microsoft, see https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/932855/vs-2013-c-default-mvc-template-breaks-upon-checkin-to-tfs-2010
The first thing I should mention is that this hasn't happened since I've upgraded my RAM. I was at 4GB when this was happening. Often had multiple instances open as well as SQL Server.
I'm finding this seems to happen when I copy/paste controls on a page. Another side affect of this is that the designer.(cs/vb/xx) file is not updated right away and I don't have access to those controls in code behind.
I've tried a handful of things and here's a summary of what I've found so far:
If that doesn't work... in Visual Studio:
If this doesn't work, here's a few more steps to try:
(I haven't yet figured out why more drastic steps are required in some cases.)
For C++ projects:
MSDN has a few things to try: MSDN suggestions
The corrupt .ncb file seems most likely. Note that in VS2013 and later, it is the .sdf file, which can be found in the root folder. Try searching for filename:*.sdf.
From MSDN:
.ncb file..ncb file.)Notes:
Logging possible causes:
designer.vb file didn't update from this, either..ncb file
Like cacau says, you must first do a clean of the entire solution. Then restart VS rebuild the entire solution. This sometimes happens when you are using Entity Framework or WCF services (Or the combination)
VS generates a lot of files then that contain code (the service reference for example). When you regenerate that code (And for example you are running a web project) sometimes you forget to stop the site. Then VS can't overwrite every file. Resulting in a global intellisense failure.
For me, the problem happens when I have two instances of same solution opened. On one of them I'm running Tests, while on the other I am making tweaks to code. Intellisense will quit working on me usually after I've run some tests and stopped the debug session manually.
The solution for me is to close all VS windows and reopen...
Did you try a clean build on your project?
VS might have become confused with some of its generated files..
None of the solutions in this thread worked for me. what worked was that I deleted everything in the packages folder. when I rebuilt the solution, nuget got the latest versions of all the folders I deleted, and intellisense started working fine. If I am not mistaken, the problem initially was caused by the contents of the "Microsoft.Net.Compilers.1.0.0" folder, but I dont know why.
If you have this problem in one file, make sure that this file is included in your project. Right Click the file, Select Include In Project. If the file is not included in your project, VS will treat it as a normal text file.
I followed the instructions given in response to the question : Visual Studio 2012 - Intellisense sometimes disappearing / broken (thanks to SajjadHashmi and others). I've copied the steps I followed (which worked for me) here in an attempt to be helpful.
1: Close all the tabs and open your file again. (Thanks to russds)
2: Clean the Build > Close the Solution > Restart Visual Studio > Open the Solution again
Further steps are listed if you follow the above link but some seem to no longer apply to Visual Studio 2013 (e.g. refresh Local Cache for intellisense).
I know that these steps involve restarted Visual Studio (which you are explicitly trying to avoid) but for those who find your question (such as me) a potential solution might be useful.
In case anyone else fell into the black hole I did ... I too suffered from this issue but NONE of the above solutions worked for me. Eventually I figured out that somehow the opening <body> tag had been deleted from my .Master page and that was causing all my .aspx pages to lose 95% of the Intellisense code hinting. Once I added the missing <body> back to my .Master page, the Intellisense finally started working in my .aspx pages again! Hope this helps someone ... just cost me 1.5 hours!
Sometimes none of suggestions here works - at least that happened to me. But don't rush with configuration resetting, cleaning up visual studio configuration files and so on. If clean/re-build + vs restart does not work - problem might be in code itself.
In my case (vs2013) I had C++ class exposed in .h like this:
class MyClass: ...
{
....
DLL_EXPORT returnArgs function(InParameters)
}
where DLL_EXPORT is defined as :
#define DLL_EXPORT __declspec(dllexport)
Same function in .cpp:
returnArgs MyClass::function(InParameters)
{
}
vs2013 was refusing to jump between function definition / implementation. Reason seemed to be DLL_EXPORT macro - I've written function like this:
DLL_EXPORT returnArgs MyClass::function(InParameters)
{
}
After that intellisense started to work again.
It's possible also to remove that define or wipe it out - according to visual studio documentation __INTELLISENSE__ - but that define did not work for me for some reason. Code snipet like this:
#ifdef __INTELLISENSE__
#define DLL_EXPORT
#else
#define DLL_EXPORT __declspec(dllexport)
#endif
Please comment if you understand why this does not work.
In vs2015 this issue seems to be fixed, but there are other problems with vs2015.
None of these things worked for me. After lot of struggle I found why it was not working for me. I always had multiple solutions open in my machine. For suppose, One solution is for front-end layer and another solution is for back-end layer.
When it hits breakpoint kept in backend service layer intellisense was not showing up. After I closed all other solutions and rebuild the solution where I wanted to debug, everything worked fine.
There could be other reasons, but this worked for me and wanted to let this community know and it may help someone.
EDIT: Few times "delete all breakpoints" and adding again worked.
I had the same problem and in my case it was the same file being open twice. For example I have dev\include\myfile.h AND dev\include\myfile.h\ (note the backslash, making this a unique string). This happens when I use F12 to find a symbol in an include file, but also have the original .h file open already; Visual Studio opens up a duplicate file, which is really the same file.
When saving either of the two instances, the changed file date will be noticed and I get a popup asking whether I want to reload the other instance. More problematic seems that it also confuses IntelliSense. I just tried closing all duplicate instanced files, and IntelliSense started working again without restarting or reloading anything.
I tried to fix my problem by solution VS2013 Intellisense constantly stops working
But it did not work for me.
Solution that worked for me is off/on Auto list members
Go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > General
