Disabling Intellisense in Vs2008

Question

Intellisense parsing brings my 12 core (24, hyperthreaded), 32GB machine to its knees every time I open a Visual Studio (2008, SP1) solution (which is quite often because VS crashes frequently) - for about 15-20 minutes (sometimes longer) - and intermittently thereafter.

I use Visual Assist (although that is not he cause - same issue if VA is disabled) so I don't even need Intellisense. I'd like to disable it but the methods I have found (adding macros and deleting feacp.dll don't seem to work for me. When disabling via the macros, for example, it reports that Intellisense is disable, but when I restart VS and open the solution again it still goes into its "Updating Intellisense" holding pattern).

I could be imagining it but I believe this has started becoming a problem since moving to 64-bit Windows XP (that is, Intellisense wasn't such a bottleneck that I even tried disabling it before - so I don't know if the techniques worked or not).

Anyone been down this route and found a solution (if you pardon the pun)?

The solution has a lot of C++ projects, with a handful of C# and C++/CLI projects too.

Answer 1

I posted a link to this question on the accu-general mailing list and Gennaro Prota responded, asking if I'd seen the approach in the following:

http://forums.wholetomato.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=8464

In summary this involves setting a(n otherwise undocumented) registry variable that VA picks up and causes it to disable the VS Intellisense for you.

This one worked for me (after a reboot). I'm still not sure why that other approaches didn't work, but I'm happy now, so I thought I'd pass on that suggestion here (as Gennaro doesn't use Stackoverflow).

Answer 2

I've found a method that works even if you don't have admin rights (which are needed to delete feacp.dll), and the macro solution above doesn't work:

1. Close VisualStudio
2. In a console, navigate to the folder where your solution ('Solution.sln') resides
3. type "notepad >Solution.ncb" (without quotes) and keep both cmd & notepad open
4. Start VisualStudio

This will keep an exclusive lock on the .ncb file, preventing VS from updating it. You will get a notification that Intellisense has been disabled.

Answer 3

You have to do that each time you start the VS IDE, otherwise it reverts to working.

Mark the Solution.ncb file as readonly, and VS will helpfully tell you that intellisense is disabled because the file is readionly, and will ask you if you want to make the file writeable, if you say no, then it remains disabled!

Smurf