So it looks like I finally have some good news to report on the annoying Intellisense problem I’ve been fighting with for some time in Visual Studio. In short, the problem is that in ASP.NET pages Intellisense has not been working correctly and required explicitly going into the Visual Design View in order to get Intellisense on any controls on the page to work. Needless to say this has been really annoying especially for complex forms that contain lots of code where I would rarely touch the UI form interface. In general I try to avoid the visual designer as much as possible since it’s so slow to load content and Html Source view wasn’t enough to trigger the Intellisense ‘activation’.

In any case, it looks like the problem is – nVidia video drivers on Vista. I’ve been running with the stock Microsoft nVidia drivers (I have a nVidia go7800 in this laptop) that installed with Vista and these drivers have been otherwise working fine. Usually I get updated drivers, but the feedback on LapTop Video Forums has been so bad on some of the updated drivers from nVidia that I had put this off.

Today I was screwing around trying to get CamTasia to work here (ironically to send a small video of the issue to Microsoft) and couldn’t so I downloaded the latest nVidia drivers from here:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12185

and to my surprise when I went into VS.NET to double check the problem my Intellisense is now working properly. Yay! I’m stoked... this has really been a pain in the ass and I’m so glad this is resolved now (I hope).

The new drivers also finally have the nVidia control panel to adjust screen color and brightness settings which had been missing in previous drivers. The default has been Ok but the default contrast was lacking which is now fixed. Also looks like the driver now properly goes into sleep mode after some idle time which just wasn’t happening with the old one.

Unfortunately I had no luck getting CamTasia to record the screen in any way – I just keep getting a garbled signal (colored lines) even when running with Aero off... <shrug>. Oddly CamTasia used to work in RC1 of Vista with old nVidia drivers. I don’t envy those guys trying to get CamTasia working in the new Vista video environment. Thankfully SnagIt works properly – that I really can’t live without. <s>

What’s really odd about this episode is that I had these problems on several machines. But in retrospect all of the machines also use nVidia video cards although they are different types of cards of various different generations. I still find it really odd that so few people ran into this issue – assuming it’s the nVidia drivers it would seem that this would catch a lot of people. <shrug>

Now the question is - what the heck is Intellisense doing to get confused by the video driver? And why only in ASP.NET pages when trying to get the generated control definitions?