The best part of working in dev tools? Hearing directly from the people who use them. Over the past several months, we here at Whole Tomato have had the privilege of speaking with C++ professionals across many industries: gaming, fintech, agtech, manufacturing, and beyond.
From those conversations, one thing is clear: despite the rise of new alternatives and lively debates about its future, C++…
TL;DR
Visual Studio isn’t slow by accident; it struggles with large projects, messy IntelliSense, and clunky navigation that quietly kills your flow. You end up spending more time searching, waiting, and fixing false errors than actually coding.
Visual Assist cuts through…
Visual Assist 2025.1 release post
March 31, 2025
VA 2025.1 enhances usability with smarter navigation, better C++ module support, and more flexible refactoring options. The updated first-run dialog, configurable test snippets, and a refreshed UI improve the overall experience. Additionally, several key fixes address…
How to Query File Attributes 50x faster on Windows
November 14, 2024
TL;DR
If your app scans thousands of files, the way you fetch file attributes can quietly destroy performance. Standard methods like GetFileAttributesEx or even std::filesystem are convenient but painfully slow at scale. By switching to faster Windows APIs like FindFirstFileEx or GetFileInformationByHandleEx , you can retrieve attributes while iterating directories, cutting expensive system…
Visual Assist 2024.7 release post
October 1, 2024
We are excited to announce the release of 2024.7 of Visual Assist! This update introduces several powerful features aimed at improving your coding efficiency and project navigation. Download the release now.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s new in this version:
New…
Making a case for investing in software tools: convincing yourself, your team, and your boss
September 27, 2024
Introduction
Visual Assist has been a longtime partner for coding in Visual Studio. It adds missing features and sometimes even replaces the default features in the IDE. In fact, you can even argue that Visual Assist had a direct influence as to how some of the features in…
VA 2024.6 is here and is available to download! This release features small but crucial updates.
IMPORTANT: Users of 2024.5 should upgrade as soon as possible, or install the previous version 2024.4.
To get the latest version, visit our website now and download the new update.
Visual Assist 2024.6 brings two critical fixes for Visual Assist’s interaction with Visual Studio.
The first fix in…
Catching up with VA: Our most recent performance updates
July 21, 2024
Throughout its long lifetime, Visual Assist (VA) has been a top-of-the-line productivity plugin with a performance advantage over Visual Studio and other plugins. Performance and speed has been a bread-and-butter factor for choosing VA—and we’ve doubled down with updates…
Visual Assist 2024.4 release post - ARM Support
June 12, 2024
It’s our pleasure to announce a new Visual Assist release, headed by a major addition—supporting ARM!
We hope you find this release useful. Visit our website to download the release.
ARM support
Big news for Visual Assist’s device support! Windows ARM is now supported…
Visual Assist 2024.3 release post
May 2, 2024
Another Visual Assist update?! VA 2024.3 is headlined by a dramatic improvement to the performance of Find References. This release also features both a fix and an improvement related to Move Implementation. We also have some key features exiting their beta phase (try them out!). Lastly, performance for C# should be better than ever with key fixes rolling out in this release.
Download the release…
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