The cone of silence that descended this summer is starting to fray a little. The
Visual C++ Team Blog has an entry talking about Productivity features in the IDE. They're willing to talk about:
- Semantic colorization - this is actually as much font face as it is colour, but anyway function parameters look different from locals, constants you #define'd look different from everything else, and so on.
- Reference Highlighting - you've seen this in other languages I'm sure - when the cursor is in a variable name, other places in the code with that same variable name are highlighted for you. It can be very helpful.
- Replacement Solution Explorer - I'm a huge Pro Power Tools fan, and if you've used Solution Navigator, you won't be surprised when you meet the new Solution Explorer. Combination Solution Explorer and Class View is the best way to explain it to a C++ developer.
- Aggressive IntelliSense - something else you may be familiar with from other languages. I like it.
- Snippets - oh, yeah!
Apparently there's still plenty more to come! Looking forward to it.