Tips and Tricks

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 that combines several functions of the IDE and Visual Assist. As in my previous posts, I will use Irrlicht Engine as my…

For a user with a modest collection of VA Snippets, the built-in type filtering and auto-sorting of the VA Snippet Editor are sufficient tools to manage the collection. Type filtering divides VA Snippets by access method in the UI of Visual Assist, and auto-sorting within a type makes scrolling efficient. For the occasional VA Snippet that is hard to locate by type filter, the search capability…

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 class, or to the derived class if you want to implement methods from all bases classes. Open a refactoring menu—via the context…

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 Sort Lines. Sort lines, we wondered. We don’t often sort when writing code. After a bit of thought, we acknowledged…