Extract text from NCB files
To convert your NCB file to another format, you need Microsoft Visual Studio or other Developer software.
To convert other file formats to the "IntelliSense Database" file type, you need software like Microsoft Visual Studio or a similar tool.
The .NCB (No Compile Browser) file is a legacy auxiliary database generated by older versions of Microsoft Visual Studio (specifically Visual C++ 6.0 through early .NET versions). Its primary job was to store symbol information to power IntelliSense, Class View, and navigation features without requiring a full project compilation.
While critical for development in the late 90s and early 2000s, .NCB files are notorious for becoming bloated and corrupted. A corrupted .NCB file is a frequent cause of Visual Studio hanging, crashing, or failing to update autocomplete suggestions. Because the format is a proprietary, uncompressed binary, you cannot simply open it in a text editor like Notepad++ to view the data. Furthermore, these files contain absolute paths and machine-specific data, making them unsuitable for version control systems like Git or SVN - checking them in often leads to merge conflicts and repository bloat.
For most users dealing with legacy projects, the best "conversion" strategy is often deletion. If your goal is to fix IDE stability, simply delete the .NCB file; Visual Studio will automatically regenerate a fresh, clean version upon reopening the project. If you are attempting to archive or migrate a legacy codebase, do not convert the .NCB file to PDF or DOCX; instead, focus on converting the source code (CPP, H) to modern standards. For extracting symbol data for documentation, specialized parsing tools are required to dump the binary content into readable TXT or XML, though this is rarely necessary if the source code is intact.
Convert.Guru analyzes your NCB file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted VBS, DTD and XAML files.
If you want to convert NCB file to JS, TS, PY, JAVA, CPP, C, CS, PHP, RB, GO, RS or SWIFT, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio or similar software from the "Visual C++ IntelliSense Database" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert SH, PY, KT, PS1, SWIFT, LUA, PL, JAVA, SCALA, JS, VBS or TS files to NCB, try Microsoft Visual Studio or another comparable tool in the "Visual C++ IntelliSense Database" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our NCB converter.