Visual Studio .NET 2003's C++ Intellisense

[Ostsol]

Not actually a 3d coding question, but does anyone know of a way to make Intellisense more reliable? All to often I find that it does nothing with many libraries. SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) are the ones I'm using right now where this has become a problem. I've read that the version of Intellisense in .NET 2003 has trouble when a header has plenty of '#if's and such, but is there any way to work around this problem?

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

Or just download the trial versions of plugins for VS 2003 that have improved intellisense.
Although I'm sure you don't want to spend thousands of dollars.

 

[AndrewM]

Ostsol, I REALLY recommend Visual Assist. You need to pay for it, but it's well worth it. Download the demo and give it a try. You wont know how you wote code without it.

www.wholetomato.com

 

[Ostsol]

Hmm. . . Okay, I'll try that out. Hopefully MS incorporates some of this stuff in VS.NET 2005.

 

[suryad]

Not meaning to start a my IDE is better than your IDE or my progamming language of choice is better than yours kind of an argument...but it seems to me that MS really makes world class IDEs that make life a lot easier...something the Java IDEs like netbeans and eclipse have yet to achieve...I think only IntelliJ has come the closest but still is far off compared to MS VS. I guess that is why VS is so darn popular!

 

[Saem]

Suryad, IIRC, VS .Net is the one taking a page from Intellij, which is still the king of IDEs.

 

[ERP]

Not meaning to start a my IDE is better than your IDE or my progamming language of choice is better than yours kind of an argument...but it seems to me that MS really makes world class IDEs that make life a lot easier...something the Java IDEs like netbeans and eclipse have yet to achieve...I think only IntelliJ has come the closest but still is far off compared to MS VS. I guess that is why VS is so darn popular!

I have my problems with Visual Studio, it still has a lot of OLD bugs that seemed to survive the rewrite with .Net. And I still can't have the same file in 2 side by side adjacent windows at different vertical offstes (why is this so hard???).
The Debugger is also pretty crappy if your debugging at the assembly level.

But if your writing C++ there is nothing even in the same league as VS. In 2003 C++ is still a bit of a second class citizen when compared to the C# tools, but a lot of that is supposed to be fixed in 2005.

 

[DemoCoder]

You'r crazy suryad. IntelliJ IDEA blows away VS. The intellisense and code navigation available in VS is very primitive by comparison. IDEA incrementally compiles and error checks code as you type, and updates the equivalent of the VS "browse info" dynamically. It performs over 600 error and codestyle inspections as you type, 30 different types of refactoring are available, code completion is type smart, multithreaded debugging is way easier, etc

VS is the best C++ dev environment, and it does some things nicer than IDEA (GUI development, WYSIWYG stuff), but IDEA is not meant to do all those things. It is meant to be the best code editor, and VS doesn't even come close when your talking about the ability to manipulate source.

 

[Saem]

You'r crazy suryad. IntelliJ IDEA blows away VS. The intellisense and code navigation available in VS is very primitive by comparison. IDEA incrementally compiles and error checks code as you type, and updates the equivalent of the VS "browse info" dynamically. It performs over 600 error and codestyle inspections as you type, 30 different types of refactoring are available, code completion is type smart, multithreaded debugging is way easier, etc

This is very much like the Language Workbench mentioned by Fowler, at least the key ideas, and this is definitely where Jetbrains got the idea for the meta-programming system. Having your code as an abstract representation and then performing operations on it, is the future. It's more like clay being moulded than a house being constructed. I'm sure you've used IntelliJ to perform some of the higher order code manipulation capabilities, definitely puts you in touch with the abstractness of code and clearly illustrates abstract vs concrete syntax.