Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 (i.e. v8) is a decent compiler, with a decent IDE. But there’s one “feature” that I dislike passionately: Intellisense.
The idea behind it is a good one: that the IDE scans your source code every so often and figures out how certain things will be compiled so that it can tell you about parts of it when you ask — the type of a variable, the parameters to a function call, the members of a class, etcetera. And it works very well… on smaller projects, anyway.
On larger ones, like Project Badger, those every-so-often scans become productivity-sucking nightmares. During a scan, the IDE sucks up all of the CPU power of the machine, and it can take several minutes to complete. On my machine, the user interface becomes practically unusable during that time. And it scans fairly often… whenever you start up the IDE, whenever you switch from one project to another, or from one configuration to another (like debug to release), and sometimes with no apparent provocation at all.
I’ve tried to find a way to disable it before, using the oft-recommended method of renaming a DLL. It doesn’t work. It might eliminate some of the scans, but the thing still scans way too often. Yesterday, after I’d had to switch my project from release to debug (and suffer through a scan) once too often, I decided to check into it again.
Lo and behold, I found a solution!
In a nutshell: with the IDE closed, replace the *.NCB file in your project directory with a zero-byte file, and make it read-only. (You may also have to copy that read-only file to your temporary directory; I did so, but I don’t know whether it’s necessary.) The IDE will complain about it when it starts up, and offer to fix the “problem;” don’t let it. Without write-access to that file, the IDE won’t even try to scan, ever!
Of course, you won’t have access to Intellisense features on that project. But I usually find them superfluous anyway, and definitely not worth the time-cost in terms of productivity — I can look up the things that I might use it for myself and save all that unproductive scanning time.
Life is good again. 🙂
A typical hacky solution for a MS problem. 🙂 Everyone else probably allows you to turn off the precious marketing fluff features. 😉
I’d assume so. I find it ludicrous that there’s no configuration option to completely disable it, especially since a lot of people have been asking for it ever since 2005.