I recently switched to Visual Studio 2010 and for Intellisense not to take half a minute to show up when using boost libraries, Microsoft’s suggestion seems to use precompiled headers.
Except that I never used them before (except when forced to by Ugly ATL Wizards (TM)), so I searched around to figure out how they work.
Basically, the Big Centralized stdafx.h approach seems plain wrong. I never want to include (even cheaply) a whole bunch of header files in all my sources. Since I don’t use windows libraries (I make C++/CLI higher level wrappers, then use .NET for talking to the outside world), I don’t have “a whole truckload of non-changing enormous headers”. Just boost and standard library headers scattered around.
There is an interesting approach to this problem, but I can’t quite figure out how to make this work. It seems that each source file must be compiled twice (please correct me if I’m wrong): once with /Yc and once with /Yu. This adds burden on the developper which must manually tweak the build system.
I was hoping to find some “automatically generate one precompiled header for each source file” trick, or at least some “best practices”, but most people seem happy with including the world into stdafx.h.
What are the options available to me to use precompiled headers on a per source file basis ? I don’t really care about build times (as long as they don’t skyrocket), I just want intellisense to work fast.
Your problem basically seems to be that Intellisense is slow for Boost in VS2010? I don’t have a direct solution for this problem, but could Visual Assist X be an option for you? I have used it in various versions of Visual Studio now and with great pleasure. Not a direct solution, but it might work for you.