Tips and Tricks

Many of the dialogs and drop-downs of Visual Assist allow efficient lookups via filtering. For example, filtering within Open File in Solution—a dialog with all files in a solution—lets one find a file quickly if only portions of a name are known. This means one can find veryLongFilenameInProjectTomato.cpp if he knows only “long” and “toma”. Filtering takes…

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 that combines several functions of the IDE and Visual Assist. As in my previous posts, I will use Irrlicht Engine as my…

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 a type makes scrolling efficient. For the occasional VA Snippet that is hard to locate by type filter, the search capability…

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 class, or to the derived class if you want to implement methods from all bases classes. Open a refactoring menu—via the context…