Tips and Tricks

C++26 Memory Safety: What Actually Ships for Existing Code

Search for “C++26 memory safety” and the results won’t agree with each other. One post declares C++ finally memory-safe. The next, titled something like “C++26 memory features won’t save you,” says nothing important changed. In reality, no one serious would believe either extreme. Everyone writing C++ knows the language isn’t memory-safe; that’s the…
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Build Announcements

Visual Assist 2026.4 release post

The first thing you do with Visual Assist is install it. The first thing you do with it on a project is wait for it to parse. VA 2026.4 makes both smoother. Download it now. This is a smaller build between larger ones — a few bigger efforts are running in parallel, shaped…
Tips and Tricks

How to Navigate a Large or Legacy C++ Codebase in Visual Studio

You cloned the repo on your first morning in your new team’s project. Twenty minutes later you’re looking at a solution with four hundred projects, a build that throws errors on a clean checkout, and a ticket that says a number is wrong on one screen. You don’t know where that screen is—in fact, you don’t know where anything lives. And that’s absolutely normal. But…
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Tips and Tricks

How to Set Up a Fully Local AI in Visual Studio

VA Intelligence is Visual Assist’s local AI feature. It runs Gemma3 on your GPU through Ollama, both bundled and managed by Visual Assist itself. No API keys, no cloud round-trip, no telemetry pipeline waiting to be audited by your security team. By the end of this guide you’ll have two features wired up inside Visual Studio: Explain with AI and Change Code with AI. If you’ve…
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NewsTips and Tricks

Visual Assist’s AI Assistant: Things You Can Do with VA Intelligence Right Now

If you’ve been following Visual Assist for a while, you might have noticed something a little different about the last few releases. Alongside the navigation improvements, refactoring updates, and parser optimizations, there’s a quieter but important thread running through it all: VA Intelligence. We introduced Explain with AI a few releases back, and with 2026.3 we just shipped Change…
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