Code completion and related tools serve as documentation and disambiguation for variable names, functions, and methods, using static analysis.
When the user types one of these characters immediately after the name of an entity having one or more accessible members (such as contained variables or functions), IntelliSense suggests matches in a pop-up dialog.
Research on intelligent code completion began in 1957, with spelling checkers for bitmap images of cursive writing and special applications to find records in databases despite incorrect entries.
In 1961, Les Earnest, who headed the research on this budding technology, saw it necessary to include the first spell checker that accessed a list of 10,000 acceptable words.
[7] Ralph Gorin, a graduate student under Earnest at the time, created the first true spell-check program written as an application (rather than research) for general English text.
[8] Gorin wrote the program in assembly for faster action; he made it by searching a word list for plausible correct spellings that differ by a single letter or adjacent-letter transpositions, and presenting them to the user.
Gorin made SPELL publicly accessible, as was done with most SAIL programs, and it soon spread around the world via the then-new ARPANET, about a decade before personal computers came into general use.
[13] IntelliSense has entered a new phase of development with the unified Visual Studio.NET environment first released in 2001, augmented by the more powerful introspection and code documentation capabilities provided by the .NET framework.
The IDE has the capability of inferring a greater amount of context based on what the developer is typing, to the point that basic language constructs such as for and while are also included in the choice list.
Visual Studio 2022 includes artificial-intelligence features, such as GitHub Copilot, which can automatically suggest entire lines of code based on surrounding context.