This update introduces a key update to Find References and a new refactoring. We are also introducing a new way to experience Visual Assist—more on this below! And of course, thanks to your feedback, we also have bug fixes and general QoL improvements.

Visit our website page and download the release now.

Replace Find References Tree Control

Whenever you execute a Find References command, the results are shown in  a dialogue at the bottom of the windows. In 2024.9, a portion of the results dialog and the logic behind it was overhauled to (1) make the UI display results faster and (2) to add the ability to search and filter through those results.

Before this update, it may sometimes take a half second or so to display all the references and symbols as the UI tries to catch up with the greatly improved Find References speed.  Now, when you are working with large projects or code bases, there will be minimal lag even as the parser incrementally adds hits to the results dialog.

Additionally, as a result of the overhaul, there is a new feature that allows users to actively search through the found results, even as the primary search is still ongoing. You don’t have to wait for the complete search in order to interact with the results.

Move Method to Base Class (New refactoring)

A new refactoring has been added: the Move Method to Base Class is a powerful tool for improving the design and maintainability of your code. This feature allows you to take a method that was originally implemented in a child (or derived) class and move it to a base (or parent) class.

This essentially transfers the method implementation, for instance, to the base class, and updates the derived classes to remove the redundant implementation. This makes derived classes smaller and more manageable—and thus, more maintainable, more readable, and overall cleaner code.

New Visual Assist Integration Modes 

This release introduces two new available integration modes for the Visual Assist plugin. The available integration modes allow users to personalize their experience with Visual Assist. The two available modes are partial integration and full integration mode.

Partial integration sets fewer features on by default and will not change default key mappings—a more vanilla Visual Studio experience. This may be useful for those using Visual Assist for a few key features, or for those who are accustomed to the default VA experience.

Full integration is the recommended setting as it embodies the experience that VA was designed for. It exposes all code completion, code navigation, autosuggestion features, and the like. Furthermore, it also exposes some of our less apparent features more.

One of the main purposes of this mode is to make it easier to find and familiarize with the features inside Visual Assist. This applies even for beginners as they can see more and use more of the available features and functions.. 

Additionally, it’s the more flexible option as it can be easier to disable a few things manually but keep everything else.  As such, you can consider full integration as the setting that maximizes your experience of all the benefits Visual Assist has to offer. And on the other hand, consider partial integration as the classic version that keeps development a bit more zen with fewer buttons and shortcuts to learn.

New “Ray” style row indicator

Visual Assist’s way of highlighting the current selected line/row now has a new option. This makes the current line appear a bit more unique, and gives it a thinner edge appearance. To be more precise, we added a new style unique to the current iteration in Visual Studio. The new style utilizes a “ray” top and bottom line going across the editor. 

Unit Test Code Generation feature

For those following the Google Test framework, you can use this new feature to create boilerplates to skip the tedium of setting up the test framework and verifying your test’s structure. With just a few clicks, you can create a new test file, pre-filled with test structure and essential placeholders, saving you significant time and effort.

To use this feature, just activate the feature on a class, and VA will create a new file with the foundation you need to start writing tests.

Availability & Feedback

This release is available starting December 30 and can be downloaded via the Whole Tomato downloads page. As always, we encourage your feedback, especially on recently introduced features, to help us make a better experience for you.

Thank you for your continued support, happy holidays and happy coding! If you have any questions or encounter any issues, feel free to reach out to our support team.

Download the release now.

The post Visual Assist 2024.9 release post first appeared on Tomato Soup.

Based in Europe, the client is a global company specializing in the development and manufacturing of high-performance systems for vehicle technology. As a company that has been in the industry for over a century, their longstanding focus on innovation has positioned them as one of the top automotive manufacturers worldwide. As part of their commitment to quality, they have invested heavily in simulation tools for vehicle design, testing, and validation, ensuring efficiency and reliability for their partner manufacturers.

They engineer and produce various automotive technologies such as engine and electronics systems for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and data measurement services.

Use case and challenges

We had the privilege of speaking with the lead developer and his team who create modeling and simulation software. We discussed their daily work and the challenges they face:

Use Cases:

• They develop C++ applications in Microsoft’s Visual Studio for internal use.
• They create bespoke programs for modeling components and simulating them in various scenarios.
• Their primary language is using C/C++ in Visual Studio because it can be interfaced easily.
  

Challenges:

• As an advanced tech provider, their workflow and output is highly specialized. Each project is tailor-made specifically for a certain client or customer.
• They have huge legacy code bases that they have to maintain and modernize. 
• Because of the precision involved in measurements, they handle large amounts of data from different sources of measurement.

Solution

Visual Assist was introduced to the team many years ago and it has since been a staple tool used daily by the developer team. They use Visual Assist for a variety of use cases including:

• Refactoring and modernizing code is exponentially faster.
  Because their toolchain was initially built sometime in the 60’s, they had a lot of code modernization and translation projects. Then they also had to integrate them with new tools and update them to the latest coding standards.
  
  Visual Assist’s refactoring feature has been an indispensable asset in updating the outdated code structures, making them more readable, memory-safe, and maintainable. It takes the pain out of manually bringing legacy or deprecated code up to standard by automatically renaming variables or extracting methods, reducing the risk of introducing errors during manual updates. This includes refactoring to use modern, secure and safe coding styles. Effectively Visual Assist simplifies their C++ code maintenance so that they can focus on manufacturing and designing parts, not code.
• Navigating old code and huge projects happens in a single click.
  Visual Assist greatly helps the team get around their huge legacy projects with smart navigation features. Finding and searching for certain sections of code is a cumbersome ordeal that VA just completely skips over with features like Find References, Find Symbols, the various Go To functions, and the like.
• Snappier performance on large projects and solutions.
  When it comes to handling large amounts of data, Visual Assist’s optimized startup speed and low memory footprint provides the team snappy and accurate code assistance. Due to the repetitive nature of their projects, the few seconds that Visual Assist saves compounds over time and can boost productivity by as much as 20%. 

This non-exhaustive list is a testament to how Visual Assist can save hundreds of hours of valuable productivity time by providing smart suggestions, speedy features, and a satisfying experience for the Visual Studio IDE.

Interested?

Interested in getting the same benefits you or your team? Visual Assist is free to try for thirty days. 

Whether you’re looking to boost your team’s productivity or optimizing your own development process, now’s the perfect time to upgrade your toolkit with one of the most trusted Visual Studio plugins. Click on the link below to learn more about Visual Assist.

The post Success Story: Visual Assist for modeling and simulation software for automotive C++ first appeared on Tomato Soup.

Download the release now and get the benefits of VA 2024.1.

Significantly faster initial startup time

Initial parse time is defined by how long it takes Visual Assist and Visual Studio to become fully active, starting from the moment a new file is loaded up for the first until it fully completes its initial parse (i.e. all features loaded and functional.)

Startup times just got extremely buffed in the first release of Visual Assist this year. The initial project parsing that Visual Assist executes when opening projects for the first time has now been significantly reduced. An example Unreal Engine project, when opened for the first time, used to take 15 minutes; it now takes just under two minutes instead! This is a huge improvement, and you will see this reflected in all projects that are opened and parsed.

More testing is underway to provide a better and more accurate performance number, but the developer team has found excellent results in their tests so far. Reports show a trend of having significantly reduced parse time for a sizable Unreal Engine project—with results averaging up to fifteen times faster initialization.

Update on Initial Parsing Time: More Testing Results

More testing results for Visual Assist’s updated parser are in! Here are the results:

Initial parsing time is defined as the point where the Visual Assist starts parsing up to the end where it completes it. This project used the latest Visual Studio 2022 version as of Feb 10 (VS 2022 17.8.6) on the Lyra sample game project provided by Epic Games. Two performance benchmarks on two different devices were done using the same methodology. 

Device 1  (High-end Desktop PC)

Device 2 (Gaming-class laptop)

Both test runs show very exciting results for the overhauled VA 2024.1 parser over its immediate predecessor VA 2023.6.

The test showed an average 1075% faster parse time using a high-end desktop PC; and 1333.08% faster parse using a powerful albeit relatively less performant gaming laptop. That’s 11 and 13 times faster, respectively. 

There is variance in the advantages gained between the two devices, with a significant performance edge on the less powerful laptop. We suspect the gains could be much larger on low and mid-end computers or laptops.

Curious to see how VA 2024.1 performs on your platform? Download a free trial of Visual Assist and try it for yourself now.

Navigate directly to a class constructor definition from an explicit constructor call

This neat addition to VA’s find reference and go to reference features allows users to find and navigate to a class’s constructor definition from a call to that constructor. 

Highlight or click over a constructor and use the shortcut Alt + G to navigate instantly to the default constructor.

Improved and expanded header selection when using Add Include

This release greatly improves VA’s Add Include detection and expands the number of actual includes supported. 

If you have not used this feature extensively VA can automatically add includes directives for you if it detects you are using an undeclared feature or type from a known library such as STL or even your own code elsewhere. Specifically, this update adds many new types baked into C++ such as std::stringstream and std::once_flag.

In essence, using Add include should automatically insert the correct include under many more circumstances.

Code completion dropdown toolbar now displayed by default 

The coding completion toolbar will now be turned on by default and will be displayed more frequently. This new quality of life change brings a visual UI as you write code. VA tries to predict your intended actions so the options shown will always be contextual apart from being accurate.

Furthermore, when you type code, the code completion UI will be shown by default regardless if you are hovering your cursor over the current portion of the code.

The code completion toolbar is displayed as you type code.

For very large projects and long source code, you can use the filter options (highlighted in the screenshot above) to select which options are shown in the new toolbar.

Bug fixes and improvements

For this release, we have severak fixes—both from examining recent features and user reports. The most notable of these improvements include functional visual changes to a plethora of features and better parser recognition of Unreal code.

• Fixed visual issues with completion dropdown toolbar
• Fixed issue where trial activation dialog could display an error and prevent activation
• Fixed issue with new “Magic Numbers” detecting Code Inspection where it was highlighting only a portion of the constant
• Fixed issue where logging could overflow and cause a crash when enabled alongside very large solutions
• Fixed issue where preprocessor directives in shader files were sometimes colored as methods
• Fixed issue where Unreal Engine Create***Subobject symbols were not recognized by our parser
• Fixed issue where changing the signature of an Unreal Engine method which requires a *_Validate thunk would result in rewriting the return of the *_Validate thunk to void.
• Fixed issue where typing a dot the start of the word in a few of our dialogs would result in no hits being displayed

Many thank to those who submitted their suggestions and error reports. Please continue reporting problems you may find along the way. To report bugs, you can send us a message or start a thread on the user forum.
You can also check our download page to update to the latest release manually. Happy coding!

The post Visual Assist 2024.1 release post first appeared on Tomato Soup.