There's really no competition. But since you ask for some C++ differences:

• Debugging has been vastly improved, particularly in the area of inspecting variables at runtime. It also handles introspection of STL containers much better


• The secure SCL (standard C++ library) helps guard against common programming errors, such as advancing an iterator past the end() of the container.


• Better compiler.


• Better IntelliSense (feels that way, anyway). It seems to handle intellisense in generic code much better now.


• Profile-guided optimisation!


• And more

I got Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, and I also haven't used VS2003 except to check my old include directory settings.

I'll expand on my IntelliSense findings, since that seems to be what you're interested in. 2003's didn't do intellisense in template code at all, really. Now I can at least have it list members when inside of a class_name<T>::function_name. It also lists constructors and destructors in the autocomplete dropdown, and it lists methods that only a prototype have been given for. So you have

class X{  int foo(int bar, int baz);}

then you can just type "int X::f" and autocomplete will list foo's function signature. You could do this in 2003, I think, but in 2005 you can press enter and it will fill in the parameters for you. Maybe I'm getting confused and you could do this in 2003, too, but in any case, it's little things like this that I like about Visual Studio 2005.

You can find more info on the New Features list at MSDN.

I'll summarise:
* Creating New Projects from Existing Source Code
* Custom Build Rules - yes, you can add your own build tools! Yay!
* This list is a fake list using ASCII because I'm too lazy for HTML (you've had a real <ul> anyway)
* Multi-platform support (Windows CE, etc, but you could add linux, OS/2, symbian, Gameboy, etc if you liked)
* Physical Directory View for Projects (SCORE! I didn't know you could do this until I learned just now)
* Shared Project Properties (Project Property Sheets) - eh what?
* XML Documentation Comments - I've actually noticed this. It seems to work with doxygen style comments too though. It's quite a nice touch.

It's called Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, and it's free. It's available for download from MSDN. Get it.

MrEvil: how did you get intelisense working? i've got MSVC++ Express 2005. and it always shows "Updating InteliSense" in status bar. I renamed some .dll file for turning it off. i searched for info, found some files, but you must register or something to download them.

You might want to also get Visual Assist from Whole Tomato Software for better code completion (Intelli-Sense). It works very nice in Visual Studio 2005 aswell.

http://www.wholetomato.com/

I have been using it for years and think it makes me much more productive.

Quote:Original post by MrEvil
There's really no competition. But since you ask for some C++ differences:

[...]

• The secure SCL (standard C++ library) helps guard against common programming errors, such as advancing an iterator past the end() of the container.

[...]

Yeah, secure SCL is sooo great...
Now tell me why it makes the following code fail to compile:


Sorry for this little hijack, overall I like vs2005 very much.