Monday, February 4, 2008

Small C++ Project, huge .ncb file?

I'm taking COMP 2617 C++ for Object Oriented Software Development at BCIT, and using Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition to do my homework. Pretty sweet little IDE, lots of Pro VS 2005 goodness for free!

But - why does the .ncb file (Intellisense parser database) for my dinky little C++ program, all of 160 lines in one 5Kb .cpp file, weigh in at over 2Mb?! According to Li Shao in this thread on the MSDN forum, "In VS2005, we have made change to remove this prebuilt ncb and dynamically parsed the files including the system headers into project ncb.", in response to the original poster, who complained that "... an NCB file of 50KB under VS 2003 now has 500-600 KB, a 200 KB NCB under VS 2003 now has about 2 MB. And NCB files that used to have a size of 2-3MB now have 25-30 MB." Sheesh! This is progress?