Increased programming productivity, Visual Studio productivity, and efficient coding are major concerns of beginner and expert programmers. Therefore, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) offers all developers’ tools a single interface. And to further meet the diverse needs of programmers, Visual Studio (an IDE from Microsoft) add-ons offer extended functionalities with support for 36 different programming languages.
Visual Assist is a popular extension that developers love around the world, developed by Whole Tomato. It’s a feature-rich Visual Studio tool for C/C++ and C# developers. It fills the gaps and enhances Microsoft Visual Studio productivity.
It helps developers with navigation, refactoring, code generation, debugging, etc. This article explores seven Visual Studio features and discusses corresponding functionalities to give you a taste of how it adds to your Visual Studio productivity.
7 Changes You Can Do With Visual Assist to Improve Visual Studio Productivity
Faster Navigation
Code Assistance
Code Inspection
Refactoring
Code Correction
Keeping The Code Neat
Code Snippets
Faster Navigation
Visual Assist allows developers to quickly and easily move between files, methods, symbols, or references in a project or solution. The Faster Navigation feature improves built-in functionality by allowing developers to find references by context, go to definitions and declarations using a default short-cut key (Alt+G) or Go button, and maneuver to source files outside your projects.
Among many more navigation functionalities is the option to easily highlight the current line to locate your place in the code. As shown below, this function highlights the current line using a background color or a thin frame.
Code Assistance for Visual Studio Productivity
Writing code faster is possible with automatic completions in Visual Assist. Code assistance auto-extends multi-line comments. Visual Assist inserts the appropriate comment tokens on the following line by pressing the Enter key within a multi-line comment.
Code Inspection
Visual Assist diagnoses and fixes typical programming errors while editing code. It performs static analysis to detect style violations, interface issues, and bugs. Personalized code inspection settings allow the user to enable specific checks. Go to the Visual Assist Options dialogue to enable these settings and click on the Code Inspection tab to edit code inspection settings.
Refactoring
Reduce complexity and improve the readability of your code with the Visual Assist refactoring feature. The refactoring feature works with both inherent and legacy codes to boost Visual Studio Productivity. One refactoring function is to replace an expression with a variable that explains the purpose of the replaced code. Refactoring introduces a temporary variable to replace any and every occurrence of a code selection.
Code Correction
Using Visual Assist, developers can correct their mistakes while coding. The Code Correction feature of Visual Assist fixes errors in symbol case and pointer notation. While writing a code, it can be hard to follow every coding convention there is. Visual Assist eases the cognitive load by taking care of the case sensitivity of a code. Visual Assist Code Correction repairs all valid symbols in the current context, whether you write in all lowercase or a mix of lower and uppercase.
Keeping The Code Neat
Visual Assist lets you quickly understand complex chunks of code by providing information when needed with an array of tool windows, browsers, and fields.
One such function displays the definition of a current symbol in the Visual Assist Navigation Bar. The Definition Field in the right portion of the Visual Assist Navigation Bar lets programmers figure out the symbols without moving from their current position.
Code Snippets
Some specific contexts use the same code fragments in programming, which can be defined as Smart Suggestions for frequent use to save time. The Code Snippets feature of Visual Assist offers this capability by defining suggestions for later use.
Visual Assist’s Code Snippets feature is more powerful than the corresponding Visual Studio feature. It enhances typing speed without compromising accuracy.
You can define suggestions while assigning a value to a type and building constructs like class, loop, and switch. Code Snippets then provides pre-defined code fragments in highly context-aware scenarios that are most likely to use these suggested code fragments.
Ready to Boost Visual Studio Productivity and Performance?
The few functionalities discussed in this article are only a fraction of what Visual Assist is capable of. You can review an extensive feature breakdown and comprehensive overview of the corresponding functionalities Visual Assist offers.
For an advanced programming experience, check out the recent release of Visual Assist 2022, which is packed with new features like syntax support for C++20’s nested inline namespace definitions and Code Inspection support for ReSharper clang-tidy skip directives.
Visual Assist 2022 is your quick Visual Studio productivity boost as an individual programmer, which integrates seamlessly into a development team’s programming routine for increased performance. Try it today!
