IntelliSense in a multiple-project VS2005 solution

Question

i'm not sure if it's not a duplicate question - i thought it would be but somehow i found very little information about it on the internet. probably the keywords were at fault. anyway. the question:

there is no question finally - after revising this post a numerous times i ended up just wanting to share my story

my Visual Studio 2005 finally is not up to date, i mistakenly thought that it was SP1 looking at the .NET framework version. but i discovered it after finding the solution to what annoyed me and made me want to write this post. it's a shame, i know.

somehow IntelliSense stopped working after i mingled a bit with importing/exporting project environment options (zenburn color scheme/restore defaults). i checked and the C# IntelliSense options are in place, but it is still not working correctly.

after some searching and trying i discovered that my own classes that reside in a different library are also not working with IntelliSense - in fact after the dot only the Object methods are shown - that is Equals() and ReferenceEquals()

months earlier i had incorporated 5 different VS2005 C# projects under the same Solution - until then i had been using separate Visual Studio instances for each solution-project pair. reverting to my previous scheme of action solved the problem - opening the old solution that contained just a single project seemed to make IntelliSense start working correctly.

moreover, "unloading" the project from my current (multiple-project) solution, removing it and adding it again (Add->Existing Project) had the same effect - IntelliSense started working again.

so much time wasted

Answer 1

IntelliSense can be a bit quirky sometimes. Most of the time it helps to stop VS2005, remove the ncb and the suo file and restart VS2005. Then it will rebuild the complete database for the solution.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Sebastiaan