I am using a suggested code line directly from the Arduino reference system,

strcpy_P(buffer, (char*)pgm_read_word(&(string_table[i]))); 

which is about two-thirds of the way down the page at,

https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/PROGMEM.

In Visual Studio the very last, right hand parenthesis of the above code snippet has a little red squiggle under it.  When I put the mouse over the squiggle, an error message is displayed, viz., "Error: expected an expression".

The funny thing is that the code compiles, executes on a UNO and gives the results expected.

Am I missing something here?

Not sure how I missed this originally

VS intellisense can't understand some underlying Arduino c++ syntax but we can redefine things if there is a problem.

You can put a dummy prototype in a .h file which is ignored by the compiler and used only for intellisense.

http://www.visualmicro.com/page/Extending-Visual-Studio-Intellisense.aspx

If you can give me an example sketch and tell me which board you are using I could give a better example