Intellisense fails for boost::shared_ptr with Boost 1.40.0 in Visual Studio 2008

Question

I'm having trouble getting intellisense to auto-complete shared pointers for boost 1.40.0. (It works fine for Boost 1.33.1.) Here's a simple sample project file where auto-complete does not work:

#include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp>

struct foo
{ bool func() { return true; }; };

void bar() {
    boost::shared_ptr<foo> pfoo;
    pfoo.get();      // <-- intellisense does not autocomplete after "pfoo."
    pfoo->func();    // <-- intellisense does not autocomplete after "pfoo->"
}

When I right-click on shared_ptr and do "Go to Definition," it brings me to a forward-declaration of the shared_ptr class in <boost/exception/exception.hpp>. It does not bring me to the actual definition, which is in <boost/smart_ptr/shared_ptr.hpp>. However, it compiles fine, and auto-completion works fine for "boost::." Also, auto-completion works fine for boost::scoped_ptr and for boost::shared_array.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I also recently ran into this and went searching for an answer. All I found was people saying Intellisense is going to be improved in VC10 or that I should improve it now using Visual Assist. I didn't like these answer so I experimented a bit. Here's the solution that fixes most of the issues (at the very least it fixes the issues shared_ptr had that scoped_ptr doesn't).

SOLUTION:

Change the forward declaration that Intellisense jumps to in exception.hpp to include the template parameter name T.

Change

template <class>
class shared_ptr;

To

template <class T>
class shared_ptr;

It seems that Intellisense considers the definition without a template parameter name to be a separate class and this is the root of the difference between shared_ptr and scoped_ptr.

Now, I mentioned that this hasn't solved all of my problems. Sometimes templated objects declared in header files don't retain there template type in the cpp files.

Ex.

// file.h
#include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp>

struct foo
{
    void funcA() {}
};

struct bar
{
    void funcB();
    boost::shared_ptr<foo> pfoo;
};

and then in the cpp file

// file.cpp
#include "file.h"

void bar::funcB()
{
    pfoo.get();      // <-- intellisense does autocomplete after "pfoo."
    pfoo->func();    // <-- intellisense does not autocomplete after "pfoo->"
}

Anyways, that's a non tested trimmed down example of an issue we still have but that's far less common so we can live with it until Intellisense improves.