Visual Studio 2005 - 'Updating IntelliSense' hang-up

Question

I am having trouble with my Visual Studio 2005 IntelliSense for some time now.

It used to work fine, but for some reason the 'Updating IntelliSense...' does no longer seem to be able to complete for the solution I'm working on currenly- it simply gets stuck somewhere at about 3-bars of progress and blocks one of my precious CPUs for eternity.

Deleting the .ncb file of my solution and performing a full 'Clean' afterwards was no help. The 'Update' simply gets stuck again.

The project I'm working on is a fairly large C++ solution with 50+ projects, quite a few template classes (even more lately) and in general quite complex. I have no idea which impact this might have on the IntelliSense.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 and all hotfixes which rely on it are not installed (we hade huge problems with this one, so we haven't migrated yet).

Any answer is very much appreciated on this one. Gives me the creeps..

Cheers,
\Bjoern

Answer 1

Rename "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\vcpackages\feacp.dll" to something else (like "feacp.bak") to disable Intellisense.

I recommend getting Visual Assist X to make up for it (it also has a number of other useful features as well).

Answer 2

I have found that the best fix for Intellisense in VS2005 is to install SP1, and then this hotfix: 947315. It has the added benefit of fixing most of the multi-core build issues.

This hotfix also includes the ability to control Intellisense via Macros. More information here.

As for making SP1 more friendly for existing code, you might also check out this hotfix for template compilation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930198