What is the purpose of Browse Information generated by Visual Studio

Question

I got a huge C++ third-party project with set of project in one solution. So build time is rather long and Browse Information generation takes a lot too. So what is the pur

Answer 1

From here

Select Generate Browse Info under the C/C++ project settings tab, for any source-files that you want to be included. This is very useful for searching for function definitions and declarations - just right-click a function / variable and select "Goto Definition Of..." and the IDE will take you straight there.

You will lose some ability to easily navigate your code. This may matter a lot in a very large code base. I know that without it and tools like Visual Assist X, I would be lost. Still, Visual Studio has a very efficient find-in-files operation that cannot be completely replaced with browsing tools.

Answer 2

Visual Studio 6 required browse information to do the things that Doug T. mentioned.

Newer versions of visual studio can use the browse information file, but by default use a newer Intellisense database. For those versions, there is basically an Intellisense daemon that builds the database in the background instead of being directly embedded in the build process. It really helps to have more than one processor or core when using Intellisense. Otherwise it can really bog down your system.