The first 30 minutes with Visual Assist

A free pocket reference for everything VA does in Visual Studio — shortcuts, navigation, refactoring, and AI. One PDF you keep in your downloads folder and open when you need to look something up.

The guide trims Visual Assist down to what you actually reach for day to day. Eight pages, built to skim — section headers carry the meaning, so you land on what you need without reading a manual. Shortcuts that earn their place — the navigation, refactor, and edit keys worth committing to muscle memory, with the Find References window and filter syntax worked through by example.

• Navigation & search — Find Symbol, Open File in Solution, Go to Implementation, Find References. The features long-time users name first when asked what they'd miss.
• Refactor & edit — rename across a project, extract method, create from usage, and the editing help that runs quietly in the background.
• VA Intelligence — how Change Code works, the prompt patterns that get good results, and what VA does (and deliberately doesn't) do with your code.
• Tips & customization — a handful of settings most users never find, and the ones worth changing on day one.
• Install & setup — the compact version, for when you're setting up a new machine.