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…
Visual Assist build 2062 is available
April 11, 2015
Visual Assist build 2062 introduces VA Hashtags—a combination of named bookmarks and task manager. Place hashtags anywhere in your comments and Visual Assist will let you navigate among them efficiently. Because VA Hashtags are embedded in comments, they act like…
Visual Assist build 2059 is available
February 14, 2015
Visual Assist build 2059 introduces a set of commands that extend/shrink the text selection. We implemented and tested numerous versions of the commands and settled on implementations we believe are rather clever. Our extend/shrink commands, collectively called Smart Select, should be valuable to all users of Visual Assist, in all Microsoft IDEs.
Four commands comprise Smart Select: Extend…
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…
Visual Assist supports Visual Studio Community 2013
November 14, 2014
Yesterday, Microsoft announced Visual Studio Community 2013—a terrific addition to its lineup of IDEs. In addition to being fully featured, Visual Studio Community 2013 provides access to the Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem, including to Visual Assist. This extensibility should appeal to every user of the non-extensible Express Edition. If you install Visual Studio Community…
Visual Assist build 2052 is available
November 9, 2014
It’s not often one gets to write “introduce” twice in a sentence, but here goes: Visual Assist introduces Introduce Variable.
Introduce Variable, a powerful refactoring for C/C++ and C#, replaces an expression with a meaningfully named variable. In…
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…
Visual Assist build 2048 is available
September 26, 2014
Visual Assist build 2048 was issued on the heels of build 2047 in order to fix a regression in the latter. Using build 2047, a VA Snippet that includes a GUID reserved string expands the string to zeros instead of a valid GUID. If you have build 2047 and use VA Snippets to create your GUIDs, you should install build 2048. Visual Assist build 2048 requires software maintenance through…
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