We are pleased to have just released Visual Assist 2021.4. VAX uses a rolling release mechanism, so it will be a couple of weeks until VAX notifies you in-product and a couple more before it’s available on the Visual Studio store, but you can download Visual Assist 2021.4 today from our website.
VAX 2021.4 is a quality-focused release. Our last release, 2021.3, was mostly focused on supporting the upcoming Visual Studio 2022 Previews. That early work on support for VS2022 means that when the official release of VS2022 is out, we’ll be able to ship official support very fast. (More on this below.)
However, not everyone upgrades to a new Visual Studio release immediately — in fact many people have very good reasons for staying on older versions for quite some time! — and we want to focus on providing what all our customers across many versions need. (We still support VS 2005!) That’s the focus for this version. This release, as a quality release, focuses on fixing bugs and adding changes for everyone.
Our release notes contain full info, but some notable changes include support for the new External Include Directories property in Visual Studio, and updating the Code Inspection engine to LLVM/Clang version 12.0.1. There are a plethora of bug fixes as well. All up we feel this release is a solid update for you no matter which version of Visual Studio, and for all ways that you use Visual Assist.
Visual Studio 2022
Swiftly supporting new versions of Visual Studio is very important to us, because we understand it’s important to many of you, and we hope you’ve enjoyed seeing VAX working in many of the Visual Studio 2022 Previews. We expect VS2022 to be released very soon. In fact, as we were preparing this release, Previews 5, 6 and 7 came out, the pace increasing so fast that our installer only mentions support for Preview 6, but we do in fact support Preview 7 as well. At the same time we’ve seen significant stability improvements with each newer preview.
We don’t want to delay our release schedule to wait until VS2022 is shipped, especially because this release is focused on what customers using other versions need, which is why we’re releasing now. But since VS2022 will be released so soon, and since we are very ready for that to happen, you can expect a swift mini-update from us adding official support.
In other words:
- VAX 2021.4 supports Visual Studio 2022 Previews 5 and 6 (with issues leading to hangs), and 7/RC3 (fully)
- We’re eagerly waiting for VS2022 to be released, and we’ll add official support for it very quickly when it’s out
We recommend you install Visual Assist 2021.4 now, and we look forward to shipping official support for Visual Studio 2022 very soon.