VS14 CTP – Create Declaration / Definition

The CTP 2 has a mostly stable implementation of the “Create Declaration / Definition” refactoring tool for your C++ projects. It lets you auto generate the definition or declaration of a member function. Example, if you have a class called Employee, declared in Employee.h and defined in Employee.cpp, you can type in a function declaration into the .h file and have the body auto-generated for you in the cpp file.

You’ll get an empty definition.

int Employee::Foo(int x, int y, double d)
{
    return 0;
}

You can do the reverse too. Say you want to add an overload without the double paramater. Just copy paste this definition, remove the double paramater and then use the refactoring option.

That’ll generate this for you.

int Foo(int x, int y);

Quite useful. That said, I wish it would do something like this. If I have code as follows.

Employee e;
e.Bar();

If you right click Bar() and choose this refactoring option, you’ll get a message that says – “The selected text does not contain any function signatures.”

Now that would have been handy. C# has had that for at least 2 iterations now.