Intellisense not working for unit test project in Visual Studio Professional 2017

Question

I'm working on a Visual Studio solution using Visual Studio Professional 2017, the solution consists of four types of projects:

• Several C++ projects
• A C# project
• Several C++ unit test projects
• A C# unit test project

IntelliSense seems to be working for all, except for (at least) one of the C++ unit test projects, and it goes even further: for some tests inside that particular C++ unit test project, IntelliSense is working, but for some other, it isn't.

As mentioned in other Stackoverflow posts, I've already removed the *.cache files and there are no *.ncb files (so I can't remove them :-) ).

I also consulted the MSDN website, as proposed by Visual Studio:

Intellisense: 'No additional information available' (See 'Troubleshooting Intellisense in C++ Projects' for further help.)

I typed the mentioned sentence in MSDN search (docs.microsoft.com), and I got 229 results, which looked useless, and I got 0 results while searching for the exact phrase. :-(

Another approach : in my Visual Studio settings, I've maximised the messages, sent to the output window, I've rebuilt the whole solution, and afterwards I looked for the word IntelliSense in the output window. There was nothing. Then I typed something in order to launch IntelliSense, I verified the output window, but nothing was added.

In order to solve this problem, I need detailed information about IntelliSense itself:

• I believe that IntelliSense is based on some files. Which ones?
• I also believe that IntelliSense is keeping its own information in memory. Is this correct, is there a way to store this memory mapped information in files? If yes, which ones, and how can I force IntelliSense to refresh its information?
• Whatever IntelliSense is doing (filling its information in memory, saving it in files, retrieving its information from those files, ...), what can I do in order to log those actions, so that I have an idea what might be going wrong?

In other words, does anybody have background information on the IntelliSense background task, which might explain what's going wrong, and how I can derive (from information in output window or other) what to do?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can try resetting Visual Studio once

Devenv /ResetSettings

Sometimes Visual Studio has these gnawing bugs that just stresses you out for no reason.