That's odd: because that is around the same time I gave it a shot too. I did not have trouble with any debugging or getting info from the code at runtime. I even found the watch expression to be working well!.
funny that we have the exact opposite experience with Eclipse CDT and VS2008. Btw: when you switched from 2005 to 2008 weren't you unpleasantly surprised with the compile time of the C++ Code? ours increased by a factor.
luckily the
I'd like to claim the exact oposite of what you are claiming. The Intellisense (intellinonsense / intellisenseless) get worse for C++ with every release of Visual Studio. For 2005 it was workable but 2008 is completely backwards. I fear what they did with it in VS2010.
If I use boost for instance VS doesn't know how to begin with providing me the first bit of information in intellisense relating to boost. even worse: it stops "intellisensing" for other code i've written completely!
To make intellisense work for us with C++ we use the Visual Assistant plugin. And for C# we also use resharper: this adds all the eclipse niceness to Visual Studio except the "find types". That great feature is still missing, or I haven't located it yet. However this make Visual Studio need 2 plugins to work well.
Perhaps if you check out a recent version of CDT all the proplems you mentioned are gone: CDT seems to be a very active project. I had no problems with debugging in eclipse CDT with GDB (after spending countless hours getting it to work with KDevelop)
So for now I can only recommend Eclipse CDT as IDE for Linux C++ app development (having only checked out Kdevelop and Eclipse CDT)
Of course you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon. After a while you'd run out of air to push against.