What do Babel, icons and Intellisense have in common?

DevCurry - Intellisense Icons in Visual Studio

“When you are using Visual Studio Intellisense completion list, you must have observed a collection of icons as shown below

There are 179 such icons and have you ever wondered what do all these icons mean? These are called Babel Icons and you can have different icons for a method depending on whether it is public, protected or private. Here’s a snapshot of these icons …” [GD: Post Leach Level 90%]

MSDN Library - Babel Icons

“The Babel Package comes with a collection of icons that are used in the IntelliSense completion lists and in the drop-down bar used for quick navigation. Most of these icons are arranged in sets of six variations, where each variation corresponds to the access concepts of public, internal, friend, protected, private, and shortcut. For example, you can have different icons for a method depending on whether it is public, protected or private.

These icons are defined in babelservice.idl in the ScopeIconGroup and ScopeIconMisc enumerations. For example, to specify a protected method, you can use (IconGroupMethod * IconGroupSize) + IconItemProtected.

The Icons

The following icons are available for use in Babel:

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Doubt I’ll ever need this, but I thought it was pretty cool that not only was the rhythm and reason behind these icons, but that it was public and published information too…