Visual Assist 2026.5 is our biggest release yet. It expands two things we believe developers increasingly need help with: checking code across a large solution, and deciding where and when to use AI.
The headline of this release is project-wide code inspections, which extends Visual Assist’s Code Inspections beyond the file you’re working in. Select projects (or the entire solution)…
Correct Is Not Good Enough: Why AI Makes Programming Education More Important, Not Less
September 22, 2026
Guest post by Volker Hillmann.
Before you read this
“If a model can write the code, why would anyone still learn to write it?” You may have heard some version of that in the past six months, usually from someone with no stake in the answer.
Volker Hillmann has a…
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…
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 company made such an impression we published a case study about it earlier this month.
But we’re not stopping there.
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…
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 for coding, and in many cases it does solve, or the very least, speeds up the busywork. The benefit is real and it’s…
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…
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 features. Its surface area grew, and the code your team writes against it will grow right along with it.
Here’s the part…
You must be logged in to post a comment.