A Salute To The Visual C++ Team
time to read 1 min | 196 words

I know that I’m usually critiquing Visual Studio, but I was working in VC++ today, and I had several Wow moments.

The intellisense story is very poor compare to C# or VB.Net, but C++ is a hard language to parse, so I’m not (too) bothered by the issue.  A C++ programmer is supposed to built his own API anyway, so it doesn’t matter J.

What really impressed me was the debugging story. I had the data tips for native C++ types like vector<wstring> (!!).  As far as debugging went, it felt nearly as good as the managed world.

One thing that I miss is the exception assistant for std::exception (or just a way to get the exception message), but I can live without it. Hell, even mutli threaded debugging wasn’t that big of a deal (for a simple scenario).

Really nice.

I implemented my own ref counting scheme and RAII for thread safety, and didn’t swear much at all :-D. If this continue, I may start going on tours through <algorithms>.

 

As an aside, the intellisense is familiar with Guard and MutexGuard, but I can’t find them mentioned in the help anywhere, and it causes compiler error when I tried to use it.

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