In our latest builds of Visual Assist X, we’ve been sneaking in some enhancements from our work on the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 beta. We decided to roll these features out early so our users could start enjoying them in currently supported IDEs with out having to wait for the full VS2010 beta. Hope you enjoy!
Enhanced suggestions are one of the items we’ve added.
VA now offers smarter suggestions based on types in assignments, conditional statements, method arguments and return values. For example, when assigning to a variable “v = “, VA will suggest other variables of the same type from the current scope. For certain types such as bool, VA will also suggest relevant values (“true” and “false”). In method calls, VA looks at the method signature and makes suggestions based on the type of the current argument. Suggestions are also offered for return values, based on the method’s return type.
Enhanced suggestions are influenced by scope. For example, VA suggests case/break/default in switch statements and private/protected/public in class definitions. Within a switch statement on an enum, VA suggests the enum items in the case statements.
You may also notice that our suggestions as a whole are less noisy, take up less screen real estate and are more accurate. They contain less of the stuff you will likely never type and better guesses at what you are likely to type. Suggestion listbox tooltips only display once you pause typing, reducing distraction and saving valuable screen real estate, yet preserving the additional information for when you need it. We hope you like the changes!
I noticed this new feature after upgrading to the latest beta version.
It’s extremely useful since our code has a set of enums with entries that have somewhat similar (but not equal) names and I always had to look up the definition of enum to find out what to type.
Thanks a lot! I’m never ceased to be amazed at the continuous stream of useful improvements you keep coming up with.