If you use Visual Assist, you are probably familiar with its Quick Refactoring Menu—available via a hovering icon or the default shortcut (Shift+Alt+Q). But, you might not appreciate how frequently the menu is available. Quick Action Menu is a more apt name.
Availability aside, the Quick Refactoring Menu is an efficient method of tapping into the features of Visual Assist because the…
Reset zoom level of Visual Studio to 100%
May 23, 2015
If you have ever been frustrated by an inadvertent zoom-in or zoom-out in Visual Studio, you probably know there is no convenient way in the IDE to reset the zoom level to 100%. Instead, the IDE requires you to “reset” via increments until you reach…
Tools to understand new code: Enhanced Syntax Coloring
January 31, 2015
In my previous posts as guest contributor to this blog, I showed you how to use Go-To tools and different Find commands in Visual Assist. In this post, I describe improvements to syntax coloring available in Visual Assist, then close with a description of a tool window…
Tools to understand new code: Find
November 23, 2014
In my previous post as a guest contributor, I talked about moving between declaration and implementation of various symbols: methods, classes, variables… and even include files. The functionality helps a lot, but there are other tools in Visual Assist that we definitely need to know. This time, let’s have a look at some find commands in Visual Assist.
As in my last post, I will…
Tools to understand new code: Go To
October 27, 2014
You’ve just started a new job and landed in front of a huge code base. Great! What a challenge! It would be nice to quickly get a general understanding of your project and be able to comfortably move around in the code. How do you do it?
In my series of articles as a…
Organize VA Snippets with hashtags
August 31, 2014
For a user with a modest collection of VA Snippets, the built-in type filtering and auto-sorting of the VA Snippet Editor are sufficient tools to manage the collection. Type filtering divides VA Snippets by access method in the UI of Visual Assist, and auto-sorting within…
Filtering results of Find References
June 17, 2014
We regularly hear from C/C++ and C# users that Find References is their most-used feature of Visual Assist. Despite the existence of a similarly named feature in Visual Studio, the functionality and speed provided by our version appears to be a game changer. And Find References keeps getting better.
Beginning with Visual Assist build 2036, you can filter the results of Find References, in…
The C++11 standard has been approved and C++14 is around the corner. These new standards define a lot of interesting language features, one of them being support for the override identifier. You can append “override” to a virtual function declaration and tell…
Implementing Virtual Methods with Visual Assist
May 23, 2014
Visual Assist has a feature—Implement Virtual Methods—that makes it easy to implement an interface, or abstract methods of a base class. You don’t need to create anything manually.
Move the caret to a base or interface class in the declaration of your derived…
Scope of Refactoring in Universal Solutions
May 7, 2014
At the Build 2014 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced availability of Universal Solutions in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC. When you are ready to explore the functionality of this major improvement to the IDE, you’ll want to know how several often-used commands of Visual Assist operate in this new arena.
As a review, a simple Universal Solution is one that has at two or more…
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