Visual Assist build 2097 introduces support for Visual Studio Enterprise “15” Preview 1, just in time for Microsoft’s posting of Preview 2.
If you use Preview 1, you can install build 2097 assuming you installed the IDE using its ISO or web installer. The Visual Assist installer for build 2097 won’t recognize your IDE if you installed it only using Microsoft’s new, “light” installer.
If you already switched to Preview 2, you should wait for the next build of Visual Assist, due in a few days. That build will officially support Preview 2. (We’ll drop support for Preview 1 at the same time.)
Also in build 2097, we implemented a suggestion that came to us from a customer at last month’s Build conference—to support an alternate location for roaming data. The customer envisioned a more efficient way to configure Visual Assist in multiple VMs and PCs. He wants to store data on OneDrive such that a VA Snippet created in one development environment will be available when starting an IDE in his other environments. Build 2097 makes that possible, and OneDrive should work just fine.
With build 2097, one can specify an alternate location for per-user data, e.g. VA Snippets. But, keep in mind Visual Assist won’t automatically write its registry settings in the alternate location; you need to force that with export/import when you setup a new environment. Export is available on the Performance page of the options dialog for Visual Assist, and “import” implies running the exported registry script in your new environment. (Edit your registry script if file paths of your two environments differ, and export/import works only to the same version of IDE.)
Also at the Build conference, we learned very few of our customers are aware of, much less use, VA Hashtags. We demo’d the feature regularly, and every viewer was duly impressed. They had no idea such a simple yet powerful feature of Visual Assist escaped them.
I mention VA Hashtags for two reasons: if you don’t know about them, you are in for a treat. If you do use them, build 2097 makes it a little easier to hide specific VA Hashtags from all of your solutions, usually the VA Hashtags created solely by and for another developer on your team.
Build 2097 also contains the typical slew of bug fixes.
Learn how to specify an alternate location for per-user data, introduce yourself to VA Hashtags, make global hiding a little easier, check out the complete list of what’s new in build 2097, or download the installer.
One final note, build 2097 doesn’t appear on our downloads page because the build throws an exception for first-time users of Visual Assist. If you are reading this blog post, it’s a safe bet you are not a first-time user; you won’t see the exception. Our next build will fix the problem and will appear on our downloads page for all users.
