Why is Visual C++ lacking refactor functionality?

The syntax and semantics of C++ make it incredibly difficult to correctly implement refactoring functionality. It's possible to implement something relatively simple to cover 90% of the cases, but in the remaining 10% of cases that simple solution will horribly break your code by changing things you never wanted to change.

Read http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html#defect-8 for a brief discussion of the difficulties that any refactoring code in C++ has to deal with.

Microsoft has evidently decided to punt on this particular feature for C++, leaving it up to third-party developers to do what they can.

I'm not sure why it is like this, but third-party tools exist that help. For example, right now I'm evaluating Visual Assist X (by Whole Tomato). We're also using Visual Studio 2005.

devexpress provides Add-in Refactor! for C++ for VS2005 and VS2008.