If C/C++ IntelliSense is not working in Visual Studio 2010

If C/C++ IntelliSense is not working in Visual Studio 2010, not even creating it's 'ipch' folder, and you are happen to still use almost obsolete Windows XP, then you will be surprised as much as me, since it's, in fact, a Microsoft bug, which was introduced by recent bunch of updates to WindowsXP SP3.

I found it almost by chance, since there is a lot of other reasons for broken IntelliSense. I was lucky not going thru all of solutions and ultimately become extremely frustrated since none of them would work.

Complexities of C/C++ development in modern world

I have not worked with C for a very long time, until recently, then I started DiggerC project. Working with .NET all last years I've took for granted it's all the benefits this architecture gives you. Going back to pure C is like a fresh shower. I'm talking not just about manual memory management, it's least significant part. The most significant thing, that I realized almost immediately — you are almost alone with a C Standard library and a WinAPI. There is just no convenient mechanism for creating reusable libraries in C. At best you can find something like this, but no more. The other part is code manipulation. The .NET 1.0 based Visual Studio .NET (i.e. 7.0) C# projects had same, or better "IntelliSense" support than you have now in Visual Studio 2010 for C. No refactor, comment or almost any other basic coding support feature, you name it — it's not there.

C/C++ code Documentation XML in Visual Studio

It's amusing how Visual Studio C++ IntelliSense team completely ignores documentation helper functions of text editor, given that C/C++ code is much harder to analyze without comments than managed code. For example you don't get anything on typing /// (three slashes) before function.

Gladly I'm not the only one annoyed with this, so a cool guy named Jason Williams wrote a tool named AtomineerUtils which does just that. Again I note it does this in C/C++ code, not just managed code (in which BTW I satisfied with built-in functionality of Visual Studio.

So here is resume, and don't consider it advertisment. You want nice and clever way to add smart XML comments to your C/C++ code in Visual Studio, then AtomineerUtils is what you want. I must add that while this tool is not free, it's price — $10 is more then reasonable for that you get with it.