Visual Studio 2005 - 'Updating IntelliSense' hang-up

Question

Hi Folks.

I am having trouble with my Visual Studio 2005 IntelliSense for some time now.

It used to work fine, but for some reason the 'Updating IntelliSense...' does no longer seem to be able to complete for the solution I'm working on currenly- it simply gets stuck somewhere at about 3-bars of progress and blocks one of my precious CPUs for eternity.

Deleting the .ncb file of my solution and performing a full 'Clean' afterwards was no help. The 'Update' simply gets stuck again.

The project I'm working on is a fairly large C++ solution with 50+ projects, quite a few template classes (even more lately) and in general quite complex. I have no idea which impact this might have on the IntelliSense.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 and all hotfixes which rely on it are not installed (we hade huge problems with this one, so we haven't migrated yet).

Any answer is very much appreciated on this one. Gives me the creeps..

Cheers,
\Bjoern

Answer 1

Rename "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\vcpackages\feacp.dll" to something else (like "feacp.bak") to disable Intellisense.

I recommend getting Visual Assist X to make up for it (it also has a number of other useful features as well).

Answer 2

Intellsense is problematic. Very problematic. When it works, it's great, but more often than not it will cause more problems than it's worth. It will hang up, it will parse through files while you are trying to compile code and will generally make VC 2005 sometimes run like a dog. As a previous poster suggested, disable intellisense (and chose a potential alternative -- I also support VAX).

Supposedly the hotfix and SP1 provided by MS will fix some intellisense problems, but not all. We have seen minimal help from these where I work. You are better off to disable it and rely on something else.

My feeling is that the slowness comes from the size of the projects. Yours seems like it might fall into that case.

Answer 3

Here is the only solution that works for me.

Answer 4

I have found that the best fix for Intellisense in VS2005 is to install SP1, and then this hotfix: 947315. It has the added benefit of fixing most of the multi-core build issues.

This hotfix also includes the ability to control Intellisense via Macros. More information here.

As for making SP1 more friendly for existing code, you might also check out this hotfix for template compilation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930198