Visual Studio 2015 Editor sees errors but the compiler doesn't

The editor finds extra errors, which in some cases make the code full of underlines (even things like “NULL” is undefined). However, if I compile the code, the compiler finds everything and it works.

It’s really frustrating to not know which of these errors are real errors and where it’s just the editor not finding some definitions from the engine.

Does anyone have a solution for this? Visual Studio is amazing to work in, but this problem ruins it completely.

Edit:

I found a temporary solution to this by chance. In VS I rebuilt the project in Development Editor, DebugGame Editor and a few others and then IntelliSense worked. For a while at least. Still hoping some better less temporary solution comes up.

Hello octafbr,

These intellisense errors (the underlines) are sometimes false positives when working with UE4. Due to some source code that does some things under the hood that intellisense can’t see, it throws some unnecessary errors in where they shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of intellisense and the only way to avoid this problem would be to disable intellisense, which would also get rid of any benefits you were receiving from it. You also have the option of getting an alternative piece of software to replace intellisense, but most of these alternatives require a paid license.

Wow then it’s not very useable; to use VS just for the compiler seems like a big waste. Do you know of any of these alternatives that work well?

While we can’t officially endorse any certain programs, the one that I currently use at home for personal use is Visual Assist X by Whole Tomato Software. It is quite pricey by some standards but I haven’t used any other alternatives personally so I could not vouch for any others.

That looks neat! I wonder how big companies are working with UE, could they be using another compiler? I know for a fact that Epic uses VS and they fully support it.

I would imagine that most companies invest in licenses for the alternatives. I personally use Visual Assist X and I also have it for work. A different compiler isn’t necessary for this case.