One of the best editor features I’ve enjoyed in Visual Studio Editor with C# environment is the real time highlighting of syntax and semantic errors etc using Squiggles (wavy underline). As native programmer, I wished a lot of we enjoy similar kind of helpful features with Visual C++ editor.

The new version of Visual C++ (coming with Visual Studio 2010) has implemented squiggles display in the source editor. Hovering over the squiggle displays compiler quality syntax/semantic errors. See the sample image below

Image Courteously – Visual C++ Team Blog

This is really a helpful feature as we don’t need to wait for finding the errors until the build and this can save lot of time. This feature is implemented atop (or make use) of intellisense. In my experience most of the large C++ projects are not directly using Visual Studio for building. If you’re directly using Visual Studio, you can benefit the entire features in a centralised manner. But the new features are certainly helps developers even if they’re using external build systems. The error list window will show the errors identified by the intellisense and this helps you to fix the issues before starting external build.

More technical details and information are available at Visual C++ team blog