frankly, I think Visual Studio is a sub-par IDE for C++. Code highlighting is pretty bare bones. Debugging often misses stack frames and it regularly loses acce

frankly, I think Visual Studio is a sub-par IDE for C++. Code highlighting is pretty bare bones. Debugging often misses stack frames and it regularly loses access to local variables. There is practically no refactoring support. The compiler has a weird non-standard feature set. Auto completion as usually not context aware. "Find usage" usually does not find every reference. I could go on... When people rave about Visual Studio, they are mostly talking about C# development. And even there, they often talk about Resharper. That said, install Visual Assist X and Visual Studio becomes quite a decent C++ IDE. That does not fix debugging or the compiler of course, but refactoring, highlighting, code navigation, contextual cues and auto completion are mightily improved.