Tips and Tricks

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…

Visual Assist includes a List Methods in File (Alt-M) feature, inaptly named because the list has grown to include more than just methods, that is a convenient way to navigate a large file. But, even if you use filtering to target specific entries, the list is sometimes unruly. You can tame the list by limiting the type of entries included in it; for example, by excluding properties and…