My employer won't pay for the listed plugins, given what is already being paid for MSDN subscriptions.
What kind of refactoring? What do you mean by code navigation?
Refactoring:
- Semantic renaming of any identifier consistently across the whole source code
- Transform code blocks into methods, functions
- Move code blocks across modules, classes
- Generate accessors, setters for a given instance, class variable
- Change type of a given variable consistently across all the places it is used
- ...
Code Navigation:
- Show call stack for every use of a certain method/function
- Show all descendents of a given class, interface across the code base
- Show all ascendents of a given class, interface across the code base
- Show which classes, interfaces introduce, redefine a certain method
- Show which binary provides the implementation of a given class, function
- ...
Where exactly is Visaul Studio lacking here compared to your Java IDEs? Or are you comparing apples and oranges -- C++ to Java?
No it does not.
The amount of refactoring support out of the box differs for each Visual Studio version (professional, premium, ultimate, ...).
Plus if I were to produce a comparison table, there quite a few refactorings from Java world that don't exit in Visual Studio out of the box.
As a small example, finding the usage of identifiers only provides partial information of what Java IDEs are able to. Which can search for different ways the identifier is being used, being called, as a method, being assigned to, etc.
As for plain C++, KDevelop, Eclipse CDT, Netbeans and QtCreator all provide much more refactoring support than Visual C++ ever did.
I do like Visual Studio and use it since the first 32 bits only version, Visual C++ 2.0. But I am also aware of its defects.
Similar to the functionality all Java IDEs have out of the box, but in Visual Studio you need Visual Assist or ReSharper.