Archives par mot-clé : visual studio

How to make your own Resharper C++ file template

ReSharper is an extension for Visual Studio that provides a lot of quality-of-life improvements over the initial VS user experience. It was initially made for C# (hence the name), but also exists in C++ ! If you never used it, but know competing products like VAX (Visual Assist X) for example, you basically know what ReSharper is.

It happens pretty often that, working on a C++ project, I want to make a new class (separated in two files : a header file and a source file) based on a kind of template, like they should all follow the same basic structure, have the same copyright disclaimers at the beginning, then start implementation surrounded in a specific namespace, etc…

Visual Studio in itself is pretty limited in that respect. And to be honest it’s very possible to just copy-paste existing files and make the necessary arrangements each time, but it becomes kind of tedious and boring over time. Turns out, ReSharper happens to know how to do this kind of thing : behold the ReSharper File Templates ! Unfortunately, it’s pretty complicated to use at first and documentation is scarce (at the time I’m writing this).

So here’s a quick guide on how to do it. It assumes you have ReSharper up and running (for brevity, I skip the part about installing it).

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How to run shell files FROM WITHin visual studio

I had a problem recently : my scripting experience coming mostly from Linux, I’m much more used to shell scripts than .bat scripts. And despite working on Windows, I still prefer using shell script language mostly for human factors reasons (I find batch syntax ugly and frankly impossible to understand and/or remember).

But contrary to the Linux world, a shell executable (also known as sh.exe, or any other flavor like Bash or Zsh to name a few) is not installed by default on a Windows. You have to install it yourself and do a bunch of wiring so that shell files are automatically executed by the shell executable using some kind of fake Unix environment (Cygwin is a good example).

My problem of the day is one of yet another kind…

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Two dangers of modern C++

I’d like to talk here about two not-so-new features of C++ (auto types and lambda functions) that managed to bite me recently, even though I thought I knew them well enough (I still do!).

According to me, it doesn’t show that one should ditch them into oblivion and never use them (but some people make their life easier by doing so), but clearly that they should be handled with care, as they more or less act as syntactic sugar on C++ type system, which can be, unfortunately, both overly rigid (which is why we use them in the first place) and overly flexible (which is usually why bugs get in our way).

Let’s get to the point.

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Aggressive commit of Intellisense suggestions in Visual Studio

Just to add a bit of context here: at the moment, I’m doing quite a lot of C++ programming on Windows environments, especially with Visual Studio.

And one thing I particularly dislike with Visual Studio’s default settings is that « aggressive commit » of Intellisense suggestions when you’re typing a type is disabled by default.

So, what is « aggressive commit of Intellisense suggestions », you ask…

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