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…
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…
Scope of Refactoring in Multi-Project Solutions
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…
Sorting One's Code
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…
Using Find References to Manage a Task
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…
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…
Taming the List of Methods in File
February 26, 2014
Visual Assist includes a List Methods in File (Alt-M) feature, inaptly named because the list has grown to include more than just methods, that is a convenient way to navigate a large file. But, even if you use filtering to target specific entries, the list is sometimes…
alt+g in Comments
September 8, 2010
If you don’t read our build change history page, you might miss some small gold nuggets. For example, back in build 1734, we added an enhancement to our goto command (alt+g) so that it operates within comments. The accuracy of goto within comments depends upon…
Open File in Solution tip
August 31, 2010
I was using the OFIS (Open File in Solution) dialog the other day and it occurred to me that I use some features in it that might not be so apparent to users that didn’t actually write the code for it. As an aside, this feature was formerly known as Open File in Workspace (or OFIW) before Workspaces were replaced by Solutions in Visual Studio.NET. It took us a few years after the release…
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