What are these .pch and .ncb files in visual studio?

c++ visual-studio visual-c++ visual-studio-express
Victor picture Victor · Feb 11, 2012 · Viewed 32.9k times · Source

I have several small Visual Studio Projects (C++). And many of these projects have .ncb and .pch extension files. Those files are quite big, and they are consuming a lot of space (over 100 mb).

What are these files?

If those files are not that important can I delete them? Can I stop them from being created?

Answer

Yakov Galka picture Yakov Galka · Feb 11, 2012

PCH is the precompiled headers file. It's a temporary that you can safely delete. You can disable its creation through Project Settings > C++ > Precompiled Headers > Don't use precompiled headers and removing the stdafx.cpp file from your project.

NCB is the database used by IntelliSense to allow you to browse the symbols defined in your project, including the inline hints and auto completion as you type. You can safely delete it. There is an option to disable IntelliSense too.

However, both features may be useful; therefore you may not want to disable them. If you worry about the size of the backups or sending the projects to some other programmer, then you can just clean the project by removing said files.

Related questions

Unresolved external symbol in object files

During coding in Visual Studio I got an unresolved external symbol error and I've got no idea what to do. I don't know what's wrong. Could you please decipher me? Where should I be looking for what kind of errors? 1&…

Read More
error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol _WinMain@16 referenced in function ___tmainCRTStartup

While I am running the simple code as below I have two errors as following: #include <iostream> #include <string> using namespace::std; template <class Type> class Stack { public: Stack (int max):stack(new Type[…

Read More
Disabling Warnings generated via _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE

What is the best way to disable the warnings generated via _CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE that allows them to be reinstated with ease and will work across Visual Studio versions?

Read More