Although I play with lots of different languages, work is a C++ shop. Until recently, I’ve used a combination of DevStudio (for code writing and debugging) and emacs (for oo-browser, pcvs and ediff). A few days ago I downloaded the eval of Visual Assist and I’m amazed that I’ve been without it for so long. Actually, I think I tried a very early version once and wasn’t impressed.
It basically does auto-completion and tool-tip API hints reliably, which is more than can be said for DevStudio. This means you spend more time editing code, and less time flicking through API documentation – a very good thing. They have a decent parsing engine in there too, so they can do “find next/prev usage of symbol” too. I’ve now written my own DevStudio addin which uses this feature to provide a “rename local variable” refactoring.
It would be very sweet if they were to expose an API to their symbol database. I could do so much with it …
Incredibuild was my other find recently. It’s a distcc for DevStudio, and again it works well. Anthony has already blogged about how we use it.
Squeak 3.5 has been released, so I’ll be looking at the improvements sometime soon.
3 replies on “Visual Assist”
I have a problem with Incredibuild working properly while VisualAssist installed. While rebuilding solution, Incredibuild seems to get stuck at some files and to compile them indefinitely. None of my coworkers have VisualAssist installed and none of them faced the same problem. After deinstalling VisualAssist, the problem seems to be fixed.
Oksana, what do Incredibuild support say about your problem?
If you haven’t already resolved this, try downloading the latest version of Visual Assist. It looks like they’ve fixed this bug:
http://www.wholetomato.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1881