Using Visual Studio 2010 Without Using Solutions

Question

I find myself working for a group with a very large c++ code base that does not use Visual Studio accept as a compiler. We are using make files. I feel totally crippled without the visual studio advanced features such as intellisense, go to definition, and refactoring. Are there any good tricks out there to get Visual Studio 2010 to have these features without the projects and solutions? Or, baring that are there any good VI oriented alternatives?

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm not sure this is possible.

However, I really enjoyed using code::block ( http://www.codeblocks.org/ ) for c++/c developpement. There is autocomplete and other feature similar to VisualStudio.

Answer 2

Seeing as how files don't have to be in the same directory as the solution, what you can do is create the solution in a totally different folder and include the files you want from their location. This will separate your C++ code from your solution.

Answer 3

I don't think you can remove the concept of a solution, but you can create a makefile project, which allows you to specifiy command lines for building/cleaning your project.

In my job all of our code builds in linux (drivers) but I do all of my coding in VS2010 using SAMBA to access the files and pterm (part of putty) to send build commands.