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Hey look I'm on TV! (well sort of)

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I did a channel 9 interview right before the holidays where I talk about the front end and the IntelliSense architecture in general. I was going to write an intro but I'll be lazy and reuse the one from the interview

https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/C9-GoingNative/GoingNative-5-Inside-the-Visual-C-ID-Meet-Raul-Prez

Happy Holidays to all of you out there who are in some sort of holiday state. If not, then happy holidays anyway from Diego, Charles, C9, and VC Smiley

We don't cover software testing—the job discipline—often enough on C9. We aim to change that starting now.

A friend of Diego's on the VC++ team, Raul Pérez, is a software developer from Puerto Rico who works in QA for the Visual C++ IDE team. He writes tests to make sure the very-front-end of the VC toolchain—the IDE and its design-time compiler infrastructure — works as expected.

There's a lot going on when you type characters into the VC++ editor. What happens, exactly? Why? What types of things can make Intellisense fast? What types of things can hinder the performance of the IDE? How does all of this magic happen? There's a compiler involved in all of this. It's not the front-end compiler (cl), but it is a front-end compiler and it compiles your source into data that's stored in a local DB for design-time use by Intellisense, Go-To-Definition, Syntax Coloring, Reference Highlighting, Auto-Completion, etc... All of these things are part of the set of IDE features that make Visual C++ visual... So, meet Raul and learn a thing or two about how the IDE works under the covers and how the system has evolved over time.