Happy Holidays! Visual Assist 2024.9 makes its way to general availability this holiday season!
This update introduces a key update to Find References and a new refactoring. We are also introducing a new way to experience Visual Assist—more on this below! And of course, thanks to your feedback, we also have bug fixes and general QoL improvements.
Visit our website page and download the release now.
Table of Contents
Replace Find References Tree Control
Whenever you execute a Find References command, the results are shown in a dialogue at the bottom of the windows. In 2024.9, a portion of the results dialog and the logic behind it was overhauled to (1) make the UI display results faster and (2) to add the ability to search and filter through those results.
Before this update, it may sometimes take a half second or so to display all the references and symbols as the UI tries to catch up with the greatly improved Find References speed. Now, when you are working with large projects or code bases, there will be minimal lag even as the parser incrementally adds hits to the results dialog.
Additionally, as a result of the overhaul, there is a new feature that allows users to actively search through the found results, even as the primary search is still ongoing. You don’t have to wait for the complete search in order to interact with the results.
Move Method to Base Class (New refactoring)
A new refactoring has been added: the Move Method to Base Class is a powerful tool for improving the design and maintainability of your code. This feature allows you to take a method that was originally implemented in a child (or derived) class and move it to a base (or parent) class.
This essentially transfers the method implementation, for instance, to the base class, and updates the derived classes to remove the redundant implementation. This makes derived classes smaller and more manageable—and thus, more maintainable, more readable, and overall cleaner code.
New Visual Assist Integration Modes
This release introduces two new available integration modes for the Visual Assist plugin. The available integration modes allow users to personalize their experience with Visual Assist. The two available modes are partial integration and full integration mode.
Partial integration sets fewer features on by default and will not change default key mappings—a more vanilla Visual Studio experience. This may be useful for those using Visual Assist for a few key features, or for those who are accustomed to the default VA experience.
Full integration is the recommended setting as it embodies the experience that VA was designed for. It exposes all code completion, code navigation, autosuggestion features, and the like. Furthermore, it also exposes some of our less apparent features more.
One of the main purposes of this mode is to make it easier to find and familiarize with the features inside Visual Assist. This applies even for beginners as they can see more and use more of the available features and functions..
Additionally, it’s the more flexible option as it can be easier to disable a few things manually but keep everything else. As such, you can consider full integration as the setting that maximizes your experience of all the benefits Visual Assist has to offer. And on the other hand, consider partial integration as the classic version that keeps development a bit more zen with fewer buttons and shortcuts to learn.
New “Ray” style row indicator
Visual Assist’s way of highlighting the current selected line/row now has a new option. This makes the current line appear a bit more unique, and gives it a thinner edge appearance. To be more precise, we added a new style unique to the current iteration in Visual Studio. The new style utilizes a “ray” top and bottom line going across the editor.
Unit Test Code Generation feature
For those following the Google Test framework, you can use this new feature to create boilerplates to skip the tedium of setting up the test framework and verifying your test’s structure. With just a few clicks, you can create a new test file, pre-filled with test structure and essential placeholders, saving you significant time and effort.
To use this feature, just activate the feature on a class, and VA will create a new file with the foundation you need to start writing tests.
Availability & Feedback
This release is available starting December 30 and can be downloaded via the Whole Tomato downloads page. As always, we encourage your feedback, especially on recently introduced features, to help us make a better experience for you.
Thank you for your continued support, happy holidays and happy coding! If you have any questions or encounter any issues, feel free to reach out to our support team.
