Visual Studio 2010 vs Visual Studio 2005 for C++

My department writes a mixture of Windows, Linux and cross platfo开发者_如何学JAVArm (RHEL Linx and Windows Server 2003) C++ code for in house applications. We use the STL and Boost 1.39.

VS2010 is now available in my organisation. If we were to move to VS2010 I'd have to make a significant business case for it. What would some of the most noticable benefits we would see from the move? Do you think it would be worth the time cost to move?

Update

Given the size of our code base and the cross platform nature of our code, I'm mainly interested in what the new IDE offers, e.g. how good is the intellisense (say, compared to VS for .net). Does the intellisense work well for very large code bases? What's the refactoring support like? How is raw IDE performance? What is the debugger like, i.e. if I hover over a pointer to a collection of smart pointers is it relatively easy to see what's in the collection?

Thanks in advance

New C++ 0x features, e.g. lambda expressions are really nice to have.

The only real difference in the two compilers is some C++0x support in VS2010. The IDE has improved a lot more, but VS2005 is fine for me too. Now are these worth the time cost to move? Up to you...

Greatly improved IntelliSense. C++0x, which means shared_ptr, unordered_set/map, function, lambdas, etc. This will in practice simplify things for you since you don't need as much from Boost. You also get access to Parallel Patterns Library (parallel for_each, etc) which really helps if you are targeting multi-core. I'd say go for it!

If you're only interested in IDE improvements, and you make a big use of smart pointers, I'd suggest to wait up to SP1 (or some SP that comes with fixes to intellisense).

As some people pointed out, there are BIG changes in C++ intellisense, to support a lot of features that other languages already had for years. The thing is that they accidentally broke the intellisense of smart pointers when instantiated with a template type.

I've posted a question with that issue a couple of weeks ago, and as suggested by someone I sent the issue to Microsoft Connect. Sadly the response from the VC++ team was that it won't be fixed soon.

Since you use STL and Boost, performance might be a pretty big deal. VC2010 supports rvalue references and move semantics, which, even if you don't use it in your own code, speeds up Boost and STL code significantly. (Although I doubt Boost 1.39 utilizes this a lot though. But if at some point you upgrade to a recent version of Boost, you'll get the benefit)

Intellisense was reworked in a big way for 2010. It's still a bit wonky, and falls over the moment it sees a template, as it'll always do for C++, but I have to admit it works much better than it used to.