Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 moved all extension menus, including the VAssistX menu of Visual Assist, to a new, top-level Extensions menu. According to Mads Kristensen, a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, the menus were moved to “give the ecosystem more prominence and declutter the top-level menu when you have a lot of extensions installed“. That reasoning might be solid, but it…
Speed up opening of editors when using Visual Assist in Windows 10 (Fall Creators Update)
November 28, 2017
Microsoft tightened security in the Windows 10 Version 1709 Fall Creators Update (FCU), but unfortunately, the tightening adversely affects the performance of applications that use the Win32 GetPixel API. Visual Assist is one such application so initial opening of editor…
Filter using logical "or"
December 9, 2015
Many of the dialogs and drop-downs of Visual Assist allow efficient lookups via filtering. For example, filtering within Open File in Solution—a dialog with all files in a solution—lets one find a file quickly if only portions of a name are known. This means…
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…
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 definitely need to know. This time, let’s have a look at some find commands in Visual Assist.
As in my last post, I will…
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…
Organize VA Snippets with hashtags
August 31, 2014
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…
Filtering results of Find References
June 17, 2014
We regularly hear from C/C++ and C# users that Find References is their most-used feature of Visual Assist. Despite the existence of a similarly named feature in Visual Studio, the functionality and speed provided by our version appears to be a game changer. And Find References keeps getting better.
Beginning with Visual Assist build 2036, you can filter the results of Find References, in…
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