So, this post is about our beloved IDE instead of actual code.

I recently upgraded my home PC from Visual Studio 2010 and 11 Beta to Visual Studio 2012. The very first thing I noticed was that after about 10 minutes of programming my Intellisense quit working and never came back. I thought to myself “what the hell Visual Studio? 2010 didn’t have these problems?!” and then, after a swig of beer, proceeded to exercise my Google-Fu to solve this issue.

Strangely, I did not find the “correct” aka permanent solution to this problem. So, after a ton of screwing around and guess-and-check, here’s how I solved it. Note that for this fix to work, you have to abandon Visual Studio 2010 or 11 PERMANENTLY. You don’t have to uninstall either of them, but if you open a solution in them it seems you’ll re-break Visual Studio 2012. Stupid, I know. Maybe a hotfix will come out eventually to fix this issue. Anyway…

If your Intellisense is anything but intelligent, and has stopped working, do the following:

  1. Open the start menu and type “%AppData%” and press enter to get to your Application Data Folder.

  2. Either you were automatically placed in the “Roaming” folder or you weren’t. If you weren’t, go to the “Roaming” folder.

  3. Open the “Microsoft” folder.

  4. Open the “VisualStudio” folder.

  5. Here you’ll see a folder titled “11.0” (the VS 2012 folder) and probably also “10.0” (the VS 2010 folder).

  6. DELETE (or rename) the “10.0” folder. Note that you can now kiss your Visual Studio 2010 settings and preferences goodbye (your projects will be safe and sound).

  7. DELETE (or rename) all other folders that are not the “11.0” folder, assuming you used to have Visual Studio 2008 or whatever.

Now restart Visual Studio 2012 and you should be good to go!