The machine is somewhere else
When you’re developing for manufacturing and fabrication, the code is on your PC, but the machine it controls is in a factory in another country. To add salt to the wound, the engineer who first wrote the module you’re now working on left two years ago. You’re left with zero context comments, no tome of documentation to fall back on, and commit…
Semiconductor Equipment Software: The C++ Stack Behind Control, Vision, and the Fab Host
August 19, 2026
The person who understood the code is gone
An all too familiar scene: Someone new takes over a legacy sensor-testing system, but the handover from the previous engineer was already over.
Roger Swann’s experience as a director for an electronics and manufacturing…
Untangling a Legacy MFC Codebase: One Engineer's Refactor
August 10, 2026
Untangling a Legacy MFC Codebase: One Engineer’s Refactor
How Roger Swann took a sensor-testing system from unmaintainable spaghetti to a stable, object-oriented codebase, without rewriting it from scratch.
When C++ developer Roger Swann took over the development of a…
Search for “C++26 memory safety” and the results won’t agree with each other. One post declares C++ finally memory-safe. The next, titled something like “C++26 memory features won’t save you,” says nothing important changed.
In reality, no one serious would believe either extreme. Everyone writing C++ knows the language isn’t memory-safe; that’s the…
AI Coding Assistants for Large C++ Codebases: What Works, What Breaks, and How to Split the Work
July 13, 2026
AI Coding Assistants for Large C++ Codebases: What Works, What Breaks, and How to Split the Work
AI tools are everywhere. They’re in your phone, your car, your office, and it even made its way into software development. It’s being pushed as a do-it-all solution…
Visual Assist 2026.4 release post
June 30, 2026
The first thing you do with Visual Assist is install it. The first thing you do with it on a project is wait for it to parse. VA 2026.4 makes both smoother. Download it now.
This is a smaller build between larger ones — a few bigger efforts are running in parallel, shaped…
You cloned the repo on your first morning in your new team’s project. Twenty minutes later you’re looking at a solution with four hundred projects, a build that throws errors on a clean checkout, and a ticket that says a number is wrong on one screen. You don’t know where that screen is—in fact, you don’t know where anything lives. And that’s absolutely normal. But…
C++26 is here. Your tooling shouldn't be the bottleneck.
June 17, 2026
To all C++ devs: If you haven’t heard C++26 is official.
WG21 signed it off in March, and the pieces are already showing up in compiler trunk: static reflection, contracts, a new async model, a real push on memory safety. The language didn’t just pick up a few…
AI coding tools are now part of the conversation in almost every software organization. Sometimes the push comes from developers experimenting on their own. Sometimes it comes from management asking teams to ship faster without increasing headcount. Either way, the…
How to Set Up a Fully Local AI in Visual Studio
May 19, 2026
VA Intelligence is Visual Assist’s local AI feature. It runs Gemma3 on your GPU through Ollama, both bundled and managed by Visual Assist itself. No API keys, no cloud round-trip, no telemetry pipeline waiting to be audited by your security team.
By the end of this guide you’ll have two features wired up inside Visual Studio: Explain with AI and Change Code with AI. If you’ve…
You must be logged in to post a comment.