Intelli-sense

[DexterHolland]

I've been working with OGRE3D in the past 3 years using Visual Studio Express Editions... I started with the 2005 and by now I'm using the 2008 version.

By now I'm wondering about the OS limitation that this solution brings.
I've read some topics on possible IDE's to use in OGRE3D, and I could really change to Codeblocks or Eclipse CDT but... I feel Intelli-sense to good to say goodbye.

As I see, no other IDE shows the methods descriptions gathered from the documentation info. Can someone confirm if I'm right?
Eclipse does that with Java, but on CDT it just lists the methods without further helping.

Can I hear some of your opinions on this problem, please?

[subquantum]

C++ is a very difficult language to parse effectively. Templates, pointers, macros, headers - it practically requires a whole preprocessor just to get started. That Visual Studio does it so well is an indicator of the massive amount of work that went into it.

The only other intellisense-like system I know of that handles C++ with any level of decency is ctags, and its frontend in various editors (like omnicomplete for vim). KDevelop also focuses strongly on C++, so they've been putting a lot of work into merging Doxygen comments with the ctag features for live documentation popups. I think they plan on releasing that with version 4, sometime in the near future. For instance, here's a blog post talking about some of their new meta-C++ stuff: http://zwabel.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/ ... -modifier/

[Klaim]

Please read those articles: [1] and [2], and this thread.

[nikki]

I use gvim and ctags (with omnicppcomplete) and I find it a lot nicer than IntelliSense on VS (sometimes VS IntelliSense didn't work right, and with ctags you can have a common location for all your library tag files and just 'include' them). KDevelop also has some awesome IntelliSense-like features.

[danharibo]

I've got to say, the C++ Intellisense is just horrible, it Usually works, but then sometimes it just refuses to actually give any suggestions. And after seeing the Intellisense in the C# IDE, It's a little annoying. But then I suppose that's how it is, C++ is aimed at people who know what they are doing, and C# is aimed at people who want to make things

[Klaim]

Did you read the links I posted before? They explain why Intellisense did have a lot of problems until now.

I'm currently playing with the new version from the Visual Studio 10 beta 1 (the second link explain how it works now) and it works really well.

[DexterHolland]

Thanks for the answers.
Yes, I read the articles.
But even with their problems, as a free solution for c++ development I can't see a better alternative.

[Vectrex]

if you have a non-express VS just get Visual Assist. I whips intellisense and includes c++ refactoring amonst loads and loads of small handy things. If you don't like something you can disable and customise most things.

[TWO]

(...)C++ is aimed at people who know what they are doing, and C# is aimed at people who want to make things

Umm no, it's because the vs c++ compiler is quiet old. It does not produce a syntax tree the ide could use to show syntax colors and intellisense information. On the other hand the C# one is brand new and was build with this usefriendlyness in mind. In the new cpp vs beta the frontend was reworked and now should support all the fency features C# devs have (and in the future maybe more).

Visual assist is a great piece of software. I'm sure it saved my months of my life and is worth every penny. Every cpp programmer should try it out.

[jacmoe]

Microsoft invented C# because they have so many developers not able to use C++ properly.

[danharibo]

(...)C++ is aimed at people who know what they are doing, and C# is aimed at people who want to make things

Umm no, it's because the vs c++ compiler is quiet old. It does not produce a syntax tree the ide could use to show syntax colors and intellisense information. On the other hand the C# one is brand new and was build with this usefriendlyness in mind. In the new cpp vs beta the frontend was reworked and now should support all the fency features C# devs have (and in the future maybe more).

Visual assist is a great piece of software. I'm sure it saved my months of my life and is worth every penny. Every cpp programmer should try it out.

I've heard good things about VaX, but I'm using the Express edition of Visual Studio so I can't use it.
The C# IDE is much better in terms of code-completion, however I haven't tried the new VS-10 beta but now that you mention the better intellisense I might have to give it a shot.

[lonewolff]

Microsoft invented C# because they have so many developers not able to use C++ properly.

Sounds about right.

Thats why everything is so bloated these days. Don't get me wrong I love Windows but three quarters of a Gig to load an OS theres days? Cmon guys

[nikki]

Microsoft invented C# because they have so many developers not able to use C++ properly.

Sounds about right.

Thats why everything is so bloated these days. Don't get me wrong I love Windows but three quarters of a Gig to load an OS theres days? Cmon guys

Use Arch Linux. Base OS is about 600 MB.

[lonewolff]

Arrrggh! Here we go again. The platform debate

[Vectrex]

Use Arch Linux. Base OS is about 600 MB.

Honestly, everytime someone mentions a linux disto, every second one I've never heard of in my life

[lonewolff]

Thats half the problem with Linux

[reptor]

What sense does it make?

Intelli-sense, my friend.

[winson]

I have to admit that Visual Studio + Visual Assist is as good a C++ ide as you are going to get. Not to mention the microsoft debugger which is much easier to use than gdb. (Used to use vim+ctags+gdb for forever)
Still use vim for all other text editing though.

[jacmoe]

QT Creator is great.
It works better than the built-in Visual Studio "Intelli-Sense" - it knows each and every Ogre class/function without me telling it where to look.
VS doesn't. You have to spoon feed it everything.

Give QT Creator a try. You can use it with regular non-QT projects.
You'll like it.
That is, when you finally find out how to turn off case-sensitive code-completion. Was I going nuts?!

[jacmoe]

I was really going nuts over Visual C++ 2008 Express the last three weeks!

No matter what I tried, I couldn't get that braindead intelli-sense to work!

It couldn't even find a definition in a implementation file, for Christ sakes!

Then it dawned on me:
I did install VC10 express, to test it..

And then, finally, half an hour ago, it dawned on me:

VC10 had taken all file associations with it, except for headers.
My poor VC9 didn't know what to do with .cpp files - apparently..

So I ran VC9 as administrator and restored the file associations.

And, voilá: intelli-sense started working again!

I don't care if it stopped working in VS2010 - all I care about is that it works in VS2008.
(Well, ish. Intelli-sense it is..)

[xavier]

I gave up on intellisense -- yes, I got assimilated into the borg, and am using VAX. Intellisense stopped working for me in our project's solution and I could not get it to go again, so after I got hooked on the VAX trial I went ahead and coughed up for it. For me, it's more like Intellisense in C# (which I like a lot) -- so the cost was worth it.

[MrD]

Visual Assist is fantastic, I miss it when I don't have it

I was used to Intellisense being flaky, but then I started using smart pointers and *boom*, no more Intellisense at all for those objects. Installed VAX, everything was perfectly fine again

[Klaim]

jacmoe> There are performance problems with Visual Studio 2010 Beta that have been fixed but are available only to few peoples. I suggest you test VS2010 intellisense once it's out.

Anyway using VAX is the best solution today.

[Fish]

Intellisense worked fine for me until I started using boost. Intellisense stopped working in every one of my projects files that used boost. Intellisense was even grouping some of my projects classes into a boost namespace in the MSVC class view. That was very odd because all of my project classes are clearly wrapped within "namespace MyProjectNameSpace" curly braces.

The ultimate solution was found by chance. Our project got large enough that we needed to implement a precompiled header (PCH) to speed up compilation. Once the PCH was implemented and we added boost headers to it, intellisense suddenly started working again and has been working acceptably ever since.

I'll also note that it is VS2005 and that project compilation time dropped by an order of magnitude with the PCH.

-Fish

[jacmoe]

jacmoe> There are performance problems with Visual Studio 2010 Beta that have been fixed but are available only to few peoples. I suggest you test VS2010 intellisense once it's out.

I am definitely going to wait for VS2010.
I need to buy Visual Studio soon anyway, since you can't apply VAX to the express edition.