Coding assistance in Visual Basic
All JetBrains Rider's coding assistance features available in C# are also supported in Visual Basic. You can find the detailed information on these features in the corresponding topics of the Coding assistance section.
In this topic, you can find some examples of using coding assistance features in Visual Basic.
You can establish a custom font and color scheme, for more information, refer to Colors schemes: fonts and colors of IDE text.
Default syntax highlighting:

Code Completion features help you write code faster by providing a set of items to complete based on surrounding context. For more information, refer to Code completion (IntelliSense).
Three Code Completion features are available in Visual Basic:
Basic completion suggests namespaces, types, methods, fields, properties, and so on.

Enum members are also included in basic completion list.

If you use anonymous types, JetBrains Rider takes their properties into account and displays them in completion list along with other available items.

Type-matching completion filters items in code completion list according to the type expected in current context. Look at the example below, only those items that have string
type are displayed in the list.

Second basic completion provides completion items for types and extension methods that are not visible through import directives in current context.

JetBrains Rider provides a set of context actions that target Visual Basic code. You can find the full list of these actions in the Editor | Context actions | Visual Basic page of JetBrains Rider Settings. If necessary, you can also disable some of the actions using this page.
As soon as a context action becomes available for the current caret position, JetBrains Rider displays the corresponding action indicator to the left of the caret. Sometimes however, JetBrains Rider provides several contextually available features for the current caret position. In this case, the action indicator corresponding to the action with the highest priority is shown, and all other actions only appear when you expand the action list by clicking on the action indicator or pressing AltEnter Context actions have the lowest priority, therefore, they often appear at the bottom of the action list.
Here are some examples of context actions for Visual Basic:
If you need to add some dynamic data to a string literal, use this context action.

It wraps the string literal with the String.Format
method call, adds a placeholder at the current caret position and lets you specify the corresponding parameter.
If you need to adjust member visibility, JetBrains Rider provides a context action that allows doing this quickly.


In case you want to convert a Visual Basic Function to a Sub, there's the corresponding context action as well.

You can easily transform an automatic property to a property with backing field. Place the caret at the name of an automatic property and press AltEnter. JetBrains Rider suggests the appropriate context action.

For each parameter of a function there's a context action that will create a function without that parameter which calls the original function.


After you add a new member to a base class, the next logical step is to implement this member in all classes derived from the base class. You can write code manually, but a better decision is to apply the appropriate context action.

JetBrains Rider automatically detects all derived classes and prompts you to decide where a base class member should be implemented and generates code.

Rearrange code elements is available in Visual Basic as well. For example, you can move a member declaration up or down within a type.

You can move a statement out of or into a block of code. For example, to move If
statement out of For Each
loop, press CtrlAltShift0←.

You can reorder parameters of a method call or a method declaration. For example, to move FileId
argument to the right, press CtrlAltShift0→.
