I'm gonna have to take back what I said about VS2012. After having used it for a few days now on a larger project, intellistupid and syntax hilighting on it are broken. Even the smallest change in your source code and it has to re-parse, even if its something as simple as deleting a comment. Since the hilighting is tied to the intellistupid you change anything and all your text reverts back to black/white with nothing but keywords hilighted. Even simple macros or templates cause it to get completely lost, causing red squiglies everywhere. The code will compile fine, but intellistupid still can't figure it out. Even when everything's seemingly fine it'll still just randomly turn itself off for no particular reason. It still can't tell the difference between a declaration and a definition. Moving around in large-ish code bases (TBH its not even that large) is now a complete PITA.

VS2010 wasn't great, but it wasn't THIS bad. My productivity has definitely decreased having moved to VS2012. I'm seriously contemplating reverting back.

That's my experience in VS2010 Ryan, hence my interest in 2012.

I'm also not a big fan of the IDE shutting down on me 2-3 times every few days when I have a lot of files open. This never happened in VS2008, at least not here. It was the most stable release of MSVC that I ever tried.

My experience with VC2010: if intellisense is enabled then the IDE will crash frequently and goes nuts often (ie. does not recognize anything and marks all of is as bogus errors). VC2012 has never crashed so far (VC2010 crashed daily, often multiple times per coding session) and intellisense has not gone nuts so far either (time will tell if its apparent stability is a statistical error or not) - however, i do have the update that among fixing various bugs adds XP targeting installed (ie. perhaps the update fixed stuff and it was crishy-crashy before that - i do not know).

So, installing the update might be worth trying:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34818
Download and install "vsupdate_KB2707250.exe" from there (it will download all the stuff it needs itself).

My experience with VC2010: if intellisense is enabled then the IDE will crash frequently and goes nuts often (ie. does not recognize anything and marks all of is as bogus errors). VC2012 has never crashed so far (VC2010 crashed daily, often multiple times per coding session) and intellisense has not gone nuts so far either (time will tell if its apparent stability is a statistical error or not) - however, i do have the update that among fixing various bugs adds XP targeting installed (ie. perhaps the update fixed stuff and it was crishy-crashy before that - i do not know).

So, installing the update might be worth trying:
http://www.microsoft...s.aspx?id=34818
Download and install "vsupdate_KB2707250.exe" from there (it will download all the stuff it needs itself).

This update has made a notable difference. Thank-you ; )