Source Insight IDE: it seems to be different, and better!

[urlwolf]

http://www.sourceinsight.com/features.html

It looks terribly good to browse large projects! Anyone has any experience with it?

[MrCrispy]

What a coincidence, I just started using it today for a huge C# codebase. I'm still learning how to use it but at first glance it seems to be a bit 'wierd' - the funky color scheme, not understanding Visual Studios .sln format and having to add files manually, and not knowing what click does what.

[urlwolf]

Please report on your experience as you play with it more

[MrCrispy]

Ok, I am frustated with this thing  The main reason I'm evaluating is to let me see function call graphs (calls, called by). SI has a 'Relations window' which does this, but it has a mind of its own and doesn't always do what you want. I select a function and the relations window is supposed to track it and update, but sometimes it'll just stay stuck and flash a stupid 'working' when in fact its doing anything but !!

And the help file is not very helpful. Lookup a command and it tells you what the command does, but not where to find it and how to run it.

I did manage to find some useful info when it did work as expected. Maybe I need to learn how to use it a bit more, but I don't see myself using it consistently.

[f0dder]

MrCrispy: if you're usually using Visual Studio, check out it's "browse database" stuff (dunno if it's available for C#, but I should thing so) - pretty powerful stuff.

[MrCrispy]

No browse database for C# or any .NET languages For C++ you get a nice call browser, .NET languages get a class designer and 'Find all references' as well as a common object browser which will look up symbols, but nothing more powerful.

I wish they'd taken more time and finished that feature in for C#, because C# and .NET are an order of magnitude easier to parse and have much richer metadata compared to C++.

[f0dder]

Hm, bother!

The browse database is a really useful feature once you learn it, I'm quite surprised they haven't included it for dotNET :-s

[exold]

Source Insight is a fantastic editor...for C++. I've found it largely unusable for C# code, unfortunately; the refactoring capabilities of Resharper makes using Visual Studio a worthwhile experience, though. I've been hoping for a long time that the day would soon come when a new release of Source Insight would arrive, with built-in refactoring support (and preferably a usable C# implementation). So far, that hope has been in vain . It's still unbeatable as a C++ editor, though, especially if you have a large and/or tangled codebase. I have a couple of blog posts on Source Insight-related stuff:

http://exold.com/article/source-insight-news
http://exold.com/article/ruby-language-definition-file-for-source-insight