I am not liking the VC++ 2011 express edition news, where you can only build metro code unless you buy the $500 version now...

So I am looking to move to some other IDE and would like it to be C++11 compliant and have intellisense if possible.

I have used codeblocks, but from what I see must be dead? 2010 last build on the website, I admit I haven't looked into it much as I been using VC++ 2010 express.

If everyone suggests Codeblocks, then how do I get the syntax to be C++11 aware? color highlighted keywords?

Thanks!

I'm not a Windows developer, but I believe Eclipse is an option. Also, I've heard great things about Sublime Text 2 which has plugins to integrate with Clang for autocompletion and GDB for debugging. I wouldn't know what the setup process would be like on Windows though.

Sorry forgot to state that I would like this to be cross platform also....

Thanks!

QtCreator is great*, it has intellisense, integrated debugger, and etc... I use it with MinGW (the GCC C++ compiler ported to windows). The version of MinGW that ships with QtCreator is 4.5 I think, but I manually upgraded to v4.6 which better supports the C++11 standard. (GCC is on 4.7, but that version hasn't yet been ported to MinGW and Windows yet - when it is ported, it'll almost completely implement the standard).

GCC 4.6 support for C++11

QtCreator has a built in wizard for the Qt GUI system (which is fantastic), but even if you're not using the Qt api, QtCreator works fine.
The only problem I really encounter using GCC is that there is a unfortunate lack of good GCC profilers with Windows support.
Static code analyzers ofcourse work well.

*[size=2]But I've never used Visual Studio so I can't compare.

[Edit:] QtCreator is cross platform. So is the Qt GUI api (which uses the native GUI, but is extremely theme-able and extendable). GCC is cross platform too (IDE, Compiler, and GUI/threads/regex/containers/general-purpase library - all cross platform).

QtCreator is great

Agreed. I had never used it until last year and thought I'd miss a lot from VS, but I was very impressed. I actually get a working symbols menu in QtCreator, too, something that has always been flaky in VS for me. Though to be fair, the C++ I write in VS is more complicated than what I'm usually doing with QT.

For codeblocks, go into the nighty build, you'll probably find something that is C++11 compliants.

QtCreator is also a great option when you work on a cmake based project. I personally find it a good idea to have a cross platform build system that isn't tied to the ide I use.

Code::Blocks is nice if you want something small that "just works" (mostly), and that works identically under both Windows and Linux, and that doesn't take half a gigabyte of harddisk nor an hour to install or 40-45 seconds to start up.

Recent nightly builds have keyword coloring including (hopefully?) all C++11 keywords and most of the standard library. Unluckily it isn't as good as you would wish for, but this is kind of a Scintilla limitation. Keyword coloring does not (and cannot easily) interact with syntax analysis, it works merely by matching strings.
Add to this that code completion in Code::Blocks is not nearly in the same ballpark as in Visual Studio or Eclipse, but hey... look who's developing those. It is not surprising that a handful of people coding in their free time cannot compete with two multi-million dollar many-thousand-developer companies/organizations.
You can use Code::Blocks with a variety (around 20 or so?) of compilers, including the ones from Microsoft and including the 4.6/4.7 lines of GCC (the former being in the "complete bundle"). The MinGW-w64 project has working GCC 4.7 builds already, too.

Eclipse is great if you don't mind a small delay every now and then despite having a kick-ass CPU, got lots of RAM to spare and don't care about disk space. It does practically everything, and it does everything well (except it's a total memory and cpu pig).

[s]Now about developing Metro apps, I assume this is mostly because Microsoft won't ship some headers and import libs in the no-pay-500-dollar version. Obviously, you won't have those either if you use any other IDE/compiler combo, at least not immediately. It's not a trivial thing to do for the people working on MinGW or MinGW-w64 to implement these from scratch (which they need to). DirectX took years to be implemented, and ATL to my knowledge still isn't.
Though I would assume that development support for Metro apps have a sufficiently high priority, I wouldn't count on having it ready by next friday.[/s]
Oh, I got this the wrong way around... you can actually only develop Metro with Express and you want desktop apps... so scratch that whole paragraph, this of course works just fine with any free compiler/IDE.

When I would need an alternative to any software, I usually check out alternativeto.net/software/visual-studio

However, I've tried to find a good substitute for VS (as C/C++ support isn't that good) I've tried eclipse, netbeans and code::blocks but I've gone back to VS. No matter how much you hate it, I still find it the best IDE out there. Sometimes a tweak or plugin can help you. I found some plugins that improve the intellisense.

PS: where did you find the rumours about visual studio express 2011 is going to be metro only? I think that the express edition is and probably will stay free and keep the functionality that the current versions have. In the worst case you can just keep using your VS10.