C++ error detection in Visual Studio 2005

Answer 1

You can try the following:

• install a plugin like Visual Assist: it will notify you about most of the errors;
• if you want to check yourself, use Ctrl-F7 to compile the file you are currently editing - in such case, you will not need to wait for all project to compile. If you are editing a header file, compile one of the .cpp files it is included in.

Answer 2

Resharper for C# has it. But for c++, maybe visual assist x ?

Answer 3

10 minutes is quite a long time to wait, are you doing a full build every time? There are a lot of techniques you can use to speed this up, for example using precompiled headers. I try to organise my code so that I do all of my significant changes in the code file instead of the header, then just do a build of that one file (ctrl F7) to check for errors.

Answer 4

You have the "error list window" that will list your errors and warnings after compilation. If you double click on the error it will directly go to the problematic line of code in your source. It's in the menu Display, sub menu "Other windows".

Keep in mind that compiling C++ is a much more difficult task than compiling Java, which explains the increased time.

Visual Assist X is very cool but only detects typos.

It cannot be compiled "on the fly" which explain the feature you ask is not possible. If you have a multicore machine, you can enable parallel building.

Tools -> Options -> Projects and solutions -> Generate and Execute -> maximum number of parallel compilation.

Answer 5

The feature you are asking for will be available in Visual Studio 2010. Here is a detailed link of the feature details that will be available.

For now, as others have suggested, you can use Visual Assist which can help a little bit.

These are called Squiggles BTW.

Answer 6

Eclipse gave me the habit that if I make some small change I will immediately get a compiler error with an underline showing the error. Seems reasonable enough that VS should be able to do this.

Eclipse has implemented their own Java compiler, and run that in the background every time you type a word to be able to detect and underline errors. I don't know if I'd call that "reasonable". ;)

It's a lot of work to implement that feature, even in a simple language like Java. In C++, where, as you've discovered, compiles may take minutes, it's harder still.

Visual Studio 2010 is going to implement this feature (again, using a separate compiler, which is much stripped down, and won't always provide correct results -- that's the compromise necessary to ensure that it's fast enough to compile on the fly).

Answer 7

I was searching for nearly the same thing, while also being used to (shit*y) eclipse... I switched to VS 2008 because of eclipse...