> Eclipse/FB does plenty of auto-finishing of > variables/classes/constants for me. Where do you see it as falling > short?
Have you used VS2005? It's like night and day (well, maybe later afternoon and early evening). For example, in FB if I'm on a new line of my source code and start typing, there's no autocomplete prompt. Sure, I can hit CTRL+SPACE and get one, but in VS2005 it's smart enough to do the autocomplete automatically. The real time save is when filling in function paramters... when I open a paren for a function call's argument list, VS2005 will prompt me with all of the valid (by scope) identifiers that match the right type (or super type). In FB, I've got to hit CTRL+SPACE and then it's just all the identifiers in scope, not a list filtered by what would actually compile in that slot. VS2005 also offers tooltips when going throught he autocomplete list based on the doc-comments for each item. Features like this make code documentation seamlessly beneficial and add tangible, immediate benefit to my coding. You can almost *explore* the code as you write it as opposed to jumping back and forth to an API reference. Hell, I've got a pretty powerful machine sitting their idle while I click away in a text editor... I appreciate the IDE using some of those spare cycles to help my feeble human brain (that's what computers are for!). VS2005 also does syntactic error checking as you type, as opposed to just "build automatically" when saving. I can always tell in FB when I have a type somewhere become autocomplete all of the sudden stops working... so, obviously FB has some idea that I've mad a typo, it'd just be nice if it let me know (VS2005 uses the common "spelling error" red-dotted underline and "grammatical error" blue-dotted underline for unknown identifiers and syntactic errors, respectively). Troy.
