Whole Tomato Software – Blog

In our latest builds of Visual Assist X, we’ve been sneaking in some enhancements from our work on the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 beta. We decided to roll these features out early so our users could start enjoying them in currently supported IDEs with out having to wait for the full VS2010 beta. Hope you enjoy!

Enhanced suggestions are one of the items we’ve added.

VA now offers smarter suggestions based on types in assignments, conditional statements, method arguments and return values. For example, when assigning to a variable “v = “, VA will suggest other variables of the same type from the current scope. For certain types such as bool, VA will also suggest relevant values (“true” and “false”).  In method calls, VA looks at the method signature and makes suggestions based on the type of the current argument. Suggestions are also offered for return values, based on the method’s return type.

Enhanced suggestions are influenced by scope.  For example, VA suggests case/break/default in switch statements and private/protected/public in class definitions. Within a switch statement on an enum, VA suggests the enum items in the case statements.

You may also notice that our suggestions as a whole are less noisy, take up less screen real estate and are more accurate. They contain less of the stuff you will likely never type and better guesses at what you are likely to type. Suggestion listbox tooltips only display once you pause typing, reducing distraction and saving valuable screen real estate, yet preserving the additional information for when you need it. We hope you like the changes!

Give the latest build a try and tell us what you think.

We recently released a feature for C/C++ that has long been requested: Add Include.  A lot of work had previously been put into our #include completion listboxes – but that work is moot because now you don’t need to type #includes directives by hand.

The Add Include command is available when you place the caret on a symbol which is declared in a header file that is not directly included in the active file.

If the header that the symbol is defined in is already directly included in the current file, the command is disabled.  Otherwise, it is enabled – even though the dependency may already be satisfied by another directive that itself #includes the header.  This is by design as many programming style guidelines mandate explicit inclusion of declarations (as opposed to happenstance or indirect inclusion).

For types and functions, Add Include straightforwardly adds an include directive for the header in which the type or function is declared.  For variables that are declared in the active file, Add Include acts on the type of the variable (no need to go to the declaration of the variable to add the include for its type).  For variables that are not declared in the active file, Add Include operates in the same way as it does for types and functions.

While the command is available in the usual VA Refactor menus, the easiest way to invoke it (at least for keyboardists) is to place the caret on a symbol and press alt+x, r, n.