Tips and Tricks

Tools to understand new code: Go To

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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 guest contributor to this blog, you will learn about my favorite Visual Assist tools that help with code understanding. My…
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Tips and Tricks

Organize VA Snippets with hashtags

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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…
Tips and Tricks

Filtering results of Find References

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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…
Tips and Tricks

Automatically add C++11 override to virtual methods

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May 30, 2014
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 the compiler that you want to override a virtual method inherited from a base class. If the virtual method does not exist in…
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Tips and Tricks

Scope of Refactoring in Multi-Project Solutions

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April 30, 2014
There is a subtle connection among the Find References, Rename, and Change Signature commands of Visual Assist, and if you didn’t perceive the connection, you might believe something was awry—with your memory. The three commands—Find References, Rename, and Change Signature—share a setting to display references from, or refactor in, the current project or all projects. The shared…
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Tips and Tricks

Sorting One's Code

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April 27, 2014
Visual Assist has a plethora of features, and it’s difficult to know them all. It’s an even greater challenge to use all of them at every opportunity. We had one user, Tom, write recently that his “very small favourite feature” in Visual Assist is…
Tips and Tricks

Using Find References to Manage a Task

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March 18, 2014
Find References has been a feature of Visual Assist for about a decade. And, while Find References now shares its name with a version of the command integral to Microsoft Visual Studio, the original has pragmatic components that should make it the everyday preference. If…
Tips and Tricks

A quick way to create implementations of all methods in a class

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March 3, 2014
We released a feature some time ago that we failed to document, and since its UI is subtle, there is a good chance you know about it only if you follow our release notes closely. I raise the feature for two reasons: 1) it’s valuable, and 2) now it’s documented. The feature is Create Method Implementations, and it gives you a quick way to create implementations of all methods of a…
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