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Comment by bpicolo | Hacker News Reader

Feels like extensions tend to make it hard to find out what you need to import to make things work as intended. Maybe visual studio proper is better at inference for it? Will only autocomplete methods that are actually in scope as far as I can tell.

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It will only auto-complete methods that are in scope (the alternative would be a bit crazy) however Visual Studio is smart: if you type in a method you know exists you can press CTRL-. to get it to add the correct using statement to bring that extension method into scope.

You can turn on an Intelisense option to show methods that would be in scope, if you had the using statement, and it will auto add the using statement if you select that. Really helpful.

Is this a Resharper thing?

Yes, it looks like that's "Import Symbol Completion" - https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/code_completion...

No, but after looking at VS 2017 on my pc and VS for Mac, apparently it's only a feature in VS for Mac- at least from what I could find. I imagine that gets changed soon but yea.

If you use VS for Mac its under Preferences > Text Editor > Intellisense > Show Import Items

In VS 2017, if you use a method that's an extension method, and don't have the namespace imported, it'll show the auto-correction bulb with an offer to import it.

Better yet, if it's from a NuGet package, it'll offer to install one (or several, if there are multiple candidates).

Compared to say Python, it does act a bit like importing free functions without explicitly naming them, but you do get the bonus of type-based dispatch and overloading.

    using System.Linq;
    foo.Select(x => bar);

    from itertools import *
    imap(foo, lambda x: bar)

Correct, it can be maddening at times when you want to use LINQ methods but forgot to include System.Linq.

What helps me cope is that in Visual Studio you can type the extension method's name and ctrl-. to get an "import namespace" quick fix suggestion. It even works when you type it with wrong casing (which happens to me a lot because I'm a really lazy typist). I'm really glad the VS team has been putting more of those in.

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