The steady stream of functional and quality improvements to Visual Assist continues despite the recent hiccups with new purchasing and licensing systems. (Those systems are being ironed out.) Visual Assist build 2341 improves one of its earliest features—enhanced syntax coloring—with the ability to set separate coloring for namespace identifiers and qualifiers, and enum members.

Extensibility has long been a strength of Microsoft Visual Studio, but extending the IDE too greatly can impede its startup. Thus, many developers are familiar with Visual Studio’s yellow status message that suggests an extension is likely causing slow startup. To alleviate slow startups, Microsoft has encouraged partners to load their extensions asynchronously. That encouragement is now a…

Honestly, the title of this post should be “Visual Assist build 2302 has been available for a long time”. I have been lax in writing. Fortunately, if you enable notifications of new builds in the options dialog of Visual Assist, you would have discovered build 2302 not long after it was released. And if you clicked through a what’s-new link, you would have learned what improved…

We strive to release only high-quality builds of Visual Assist, but this latest round required a few attempts to get right. Fortunately, build 2283.2 is worth the wait. It has several, oft-requested improvements. The dialog for Open File in Solution (Shift+Alt+O), improved just a few months ago, now includes a second edit field that lets you define persistent filters—ones active for all…