What Is C++ Refactoring?

Refactoring is the process of improving or updating existing code without changing the functionality of the program. In the process of refactoring, you can improve the design, structure, and implementation of the software, and clean up unnecessary dependencies, code duplications, and other types of confusion.

In software development, development teams are constantly extending the code and adding new functionalities. Over time, the quality of the code can deteriorate, which causes difficulties in its understanding and the occurrence of errors. Code refactoring makes it possible to improve the readability of the code, simplify it, create a modern architecture, simplify the maintenance process, and reduce the number of errors.

What Are The Advantages Of C++ Refactoring?

• Making code easier to understand and analyze.
• Simplifying the addition of new functionality to software results in increased development efficiency.
• Improvement of software architecture.
• Optimizing resource usage.
• Increased security.
• Productivity improvement.
• Simplifying the process of finding and fixing errors.
• Reducing the number of errors.

When Should We Start Refactoring A Code?

For effective refactoring, the developers must be familiar with the code. In addition, to avoid errors in the refactoring process, it is important to have sufficient code coverage with automated tests.

You should think about code refactoring in the following cases:

• The code is hard to understand. In this case, the process of updating the code and finding errors becomes longer, and it is possible to create duplicates, unnecessary dependencies, and even more complexity of the code.
• Software slowdown. When the code is complex and has many dependencies, it can slow down the software. This leads to dissatisfaction among end users who may refuse to use it.
• The presence of a large number of errors in the code. If the code is complex and confusing, the debugging process becomes much more difficult. Fixing one error may cause others to appear. To avoid this, it is important to refactor the code to simplify it as much as possible.
• Code duplication. Each element of the program must be unique. If there are duplications in the code, it increases the time to read it and makes it difficult to understand, as well as increases the probability of errors.

What Are C++ Refactoring Best Practices?

• Before refactoring, it is important to cover the code with automated tests.
• Refactor incrementally, making small changes to the code while keeping the program in a working state.
• Separate the processes of refactoring and creation of new functionality. No new features should be added during refactoring.
• The result of refactoring should be simpler and more understandable code.
• For testing a few refactoring iterations, use not only unit tests but manual testing too.
• Follow the coding standard used by your company.
• Remove deprecated code such as dynamic exception specification.

How To Refactor Code Easily?

Visual Assist is a productivity extension for Visual Studio that provides advanced code refactoring tools, quick navigation, rendering, correction, code maintenance, and code inspection functions. Using the Visual Assist C++ extension, you can easily improve code readability, simplify it, and fix broken code. You can refactor separate class or several dependent classes simultaneously.

How To Access Refactoring Commands?

You can access the refactoring commands in several ways:

• Go to the desired symbol and open the context-sensitive quick action and refactoring menu using the Shift+Alt+Q short keys.

• Use the context menu of the text editor to open a complete list of refactoring commands.
• Place the cursor over the desired symbol to display the icon, then click the icon to open the context menu.

How To Change The Signature Of A Method?

Visual Assist allows you to change the method name, return type, visibility, names, types, number, and order of parameters in a simple dialog box. Automatic signature change is possible in all inherited and overridden methods, as well as in all method references.

How To Encapsulate The Field?

With Visual Assist, you can create accessors to a member field by encapsulating the field. Accessories are created and assigned automatically. You can create accessor methods next to the declaration in the header file and can stay in the header file or implement them in the source file.

How To Extract The Method?

You can quickly simplify long methods and make them easier to read and understand. To do this, highlight the required code segment and call the Extract Method refactoring. Visual Assist automatically detects the method signature, moves the selected code segment into the new method, and replaces the segment with a call to the new method.

How To Move Implementation?

In C/C++, you can easily move a method implementation from the source to the header file and vice versa. To do this, select the desired method, call up the refactoring context menu, and select the move command.

In addition, it is possible to move all methods from the header file to the source file in one operation. To do this, call the move command from the class name. This will bring up a dialog where you can select the methods you want to move.

How To Rename?

Visual Assist provides the ability to quickly and accurately rename symbol definitions and declarations, all references to them, and occurrences in comments and lines in the active project and throughout the solution. You can rename classes, enums, fields, macros, methods, method parameters, and variables. To do this, choose Rename from the refactoring menu, specify a new name, and use the preview to determine which occurrences of the symbol need to be renamed.

You can also rename the document and related files without breaking the build. Visual Assist automatically updates files, projects, and solutions and then propagates the renames through source control systems that integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio.

How to automatically inspect your code?

Visual Assist provides a function to check the code for certain quality issues based on LLVM Clang tidy. It diagnoses and corrects common programming errors, such as style violations, misuse of the interface, and errors that can be detected by static analysis. The code inspection function runs in a process separate from the Visual Studio process. This avoids reducing IDE performance.

Enable code inspection in the Visual Assist options to highlight code issues in the Visual Studio text editor. Code inspections will appear as a blue line on the line where an issue is found. You can click on this to accept the suggestion. You can also scan an entire file and make batch edits.

Here are some of the code inspection checks available in Visual Assist. If you want the complete list, head on over the list of code inspections.

Are you interested in how to improve developer productivity in Visual Studio using Visual Assist and C++ refactoring? Download a free trial of Visual Assist today.

The post C++ Refactoring Tips And Tricks first appeared on Tomato Soup.

What Is Visual Studio?

Visual Studio 2022 is one of the most powerful and popular IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) among .Net and C++ developers. It can be used for the development of various types of software, including websites, web services, mobile, desktop, web apps, games, and so on.

Visual Studio provides many features that speed up and simplify the process of writing and testing code, including a code editor with IntelliSense and code refactoring, an integrated debugger that can work as a source-level and machine-level debugger, tools for creating the user interface, a code profiler, etc.

You can download the Visual Studio installer from the official website.

How To Use Visual Studio For C++?

C++ is a popular low-level, high-performance programming language that can be used to create many different types of applications. Visual Studio has all the tools you need to easily write C++ applications.

Visual Studio supports various versions of the standard for the C++ programming language and allows you to use all its modern features. With Visual Studio C++, you can perform classic Microsoft Windows desktop development or universal Windows applications for HoloLens, Surface Hub, PC, and Xbox development.

In addition, you can use Microsoft Visual C++ for Linux development, mobile, and game development.

What Are The Most Common Visual Studio C++ Pain Points?

Although Visual Studio offers many useful tools and is a great solution for C++ development, there are pain points that developers who use it occasionally run into.

Poor performance

While it is designed for C++, these projects can sometimes be extra complex and Visual Studio may struggle performance-wise. It would require more resources such as disk space and operating system memory. This is especially noticeable when working with large projects.

Long build time and slow compilation

The process of building projects takes a lot of time. The compilation is slow, which greatly complicates and slows down the process of finding and correcting bugs in the source code.

Stutters and freezes during coding

Sometimes there are cases where the machine freezes during coding, which leads to the need to reboot it. In this case, the programmers need to start over the unfinished work should they be unlucky enough to have forgotten to save.

Chaotic file organization

When working with C++ files in Visual Studio, you need to first create folders and files on the computer disk. Then you need to create a project in Visual Studio and add the already created files and folders to it. The project only lists the names and paths of files and folders that should already exist on your drive. This is different from how Visual Studio works with other programming languages and is awkward and confusing, especially on collaborative projects or complex solutions.

Understanding Complex C++ Language

C++ is a complex programming language that supports higher-order types, a standard library for CPU cache line sizing, dimensional analysis, and other functional paradigms. Even experienced C++ developers have to learn hidden features and discover new ways to optimize their development.

So, it’s time to solve the most common Visual Studio pain points.

What Are The Visual Studio Extensions Available In The Market?

Visual Studio Marketplace [1] provides a wide range of extensions to enhance the capabilities of Visual Studio. GitHub Extension for Visual Studio, CodeMaid, and Visual Assist are very popular among the developer community.

By making it simple to connect to and collaborate with your repositories on GitHub and GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Extension improves Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio 2017. It creates new repositories or clones existing ones to get working together.

Our C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript, and TypeScript coding may be cleaned up and made simpler with the help of the open source CodeMaid Visual Studio extension.

More extensions are available in the marketplace to enhance the capabilities of Visual Studio and improve productivity. However, Visual Assist provides solutions for most Visual Studio C++ pain points mentioned earlier. The following section will discuss it in detail.

The Pain Killer You Need – Visual Assist

Visual Assist is a productivity extension for Visual Studio that has many features for refactoring, quick navigation, code generation, and much more. It provides tools for the automatic detection and correction of errors in the code, automatic understanding, and completion of the code, syntax highlighting, and improved debugging functions. Using Visual Assist greatly simplifies the process of coding in Visual Studio C++ and increases development productivity.

Advantages of Using Whole Tomato –  Visual Assist

Let’s list the main benefits of using Whole Tomato Visual Assist.

Increase Your Productivity

Visual Assist offers advanced navigation features that let you quickly go to any file, method, reference, or code symbol in your projects or solutions. You can also automate code refactoring activities. Advanced features of automatic code generation make the process of writing code as fast as possible, which significantly increases development productivity.

Fast & Responsive Tooling

All Visual Assist commands and tools are responsive and work quickly, which allows you to use them even when working with large and complex projects.

Helps Optimize Workflows

With Visual Assist tools that make code generation and debugging easier, you can optimize and streamline your project workflows.

Adds Support (Fills Gaps)

If you have any problems with Visual Assist, you can use our knowledge base or search for a solution to your problem in the forum. In addition, there is technical support where you can get answers to all questions about working with the Visual Assist extension.

Everything Becomes Customizable

You can fully customize Visual Assist to your liking. This includes customizing colors and shortcuts.

Final Verdict

Visual Assist is the best extension for Visual Studio C++ development, which has numerous advantages and makes the coding process quick and easy. Give Whole Tomato a spin. Sign up for free.

FAQ

Which Visual Studio is Best for C++?

Visual Studio is a widely used IDE that is excellent for development in C++ and supports various standards of this programming language. Another popular Microsoft product used for C++ coding is Visual Studio Code. It is an open-source, cross-platform code editor that offers “Microsoft C/C++” extensions for C++ programming.

How do I Find Build Errors in Visual Studio?

To find build errors in Visual Studio you should choose View -> Error list or use the shortcut Ctrl+\, E. In addition to errors, you can also view a list of warnings and other messages.

How do I Resolve to Build Errors in Visual Studio?

Select the error message in Visual Studio and press F1. Visual Studio will open the documentation page for this error, where you can find workarounds.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/

The post Solving The Most Common Visual Studio C++ Pain Points first appeared on Tomato Soup.

In this article, we will explain why you should use C++ extensions and analyze the top 5 extensions that allow you to improve Visual Studio productivity.

C++ and Visual Studio: How is One Incomplete without Another?

C++ is a popular programming language that is widely used to develop software for various industries. With C++, we can create applications for different operating systems, including Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, and develop new programming languages, games, embedded systems, and more.

Visual Studio is a powerful IDE (integrated development environment) that is one of the most popular among C++ developers. It provides advanced features that allow them to significantly simplify and speed up the process of writing, debugging, and testing C++ code.

Also, Visual Studio makes it easy to install extensions using the Manage Extensions dialog. When this dialog opens, you can see the list of currently installed extensions. A list of available extensions you can find in the Visual Studio marketplace. Also, you can publish your own extension to the marketplace.

Visual Studio Extensions: How they help You Become a Pro?

There are a lot of extensions for Visual Studio. They provide additional functionality and convenient tools that allow you to simplify, speed up, and automate the process of writing code, resulting in increased Visual Studio productivity.

Since there is a large selection of Visual Studio extensions, it can be difficult for some to choose the best one. So, go through the list of the Top 5 Visual Studio Extensions.

Top 5 Visual Studio Extensions

We have selected the 5 best Visual Studio Extensions and analyzed their main functionalities, advantages, and disadvantages. Read and choose the extension that suits you better than others.

Visual Assist

Whole Tomato Visual Assist is a popular powerful extension that provides a lot of functions to significantly simplify and speed up the process of writing code.

The main Visual Assist features are:

• Quick navigation. You can easily navigate to any file, method, or symbol in your code.
• Easy formatting. Visual Assist is an opinionated code formatter that automatically formats code according to the given style.
• Refactoring allows you to simplify and improve code readability.
• Automatic code generation and auto-completion make the process of writing code much faster.
• Ability to use ready-made code snippets.
• Automatic error correction in code and comments when typing.
• Ability to search files using regular expressions and patterns.
• Ability to automatically diagnose and correct common programming errors.

In addition, Visual Assist supports the popular and powerful 3D graphics development tool Unreal Engine. This feature allows you to easily create high-performance 3D applications using C++ and Unreal Engine.

ReSharper C++

An alternative popular extension that allows you to increase development productivity is ReSharper. It provides quick search and navigation features, auto-completion and code generation, refactoring, and more.

The main disadvantages of ReSharper are its high cost and slow operation, which can cause windows to freeze.

Code Runner

Another good Visual Studio extension is Code Runner. It allows you to run the source code of the file, the selected code snippet, or a custom command and view the results of the invocation in the Output Window with no need for terminal interaction.

Code Compare

Code Compare is a handy tool for comparing and merging files and folders. It highlights the inserted, deleted, and modified text in rows in detail.

Code Compare allows you to collapse unchanged areas of text, edit files on the fly, and easily merge using the mouse pointer. However, Code Compare for Visual Studio IDE can operate slowly.

SonarLint

SonarLint is a static code analyzer that allows you to find bugs and code quality and security issues. It uses hundreds of rules to analyze the code. You can disable some rules on the fly or exclude some project files from the analysis.

Final Verdict

Using Visual Studio Extensions greatly simplifies the coding process and reduces the number of errors. In this article, we talked about the top 5 Visual Studio C++ extensions and analyzed their advantages and disadvantages. You should choose the right extension for your according to your budget and requirements.

Whole Tomato Visual Assist is a powerful Visual Studio extension that provides all the features you need to quickly code, navigate, search, and debug.

Install a free trial version of Visual Assist and make sure that it is the best C++ extension on the market.

FAQ

Is Visual Studio a good IDE for C++?

Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs for C++ as it provides powerful functionality for quickly writing code, debugging, and testing software.

Is Visual Studio 2022 good for C++?

Visual Studio 2022 has new features to improve development productivity and also includes robust support for C++ workloads, making it a good choice for C++ development.

How can I be more productive in VS Code?

In order to be more productive when developing using Visual Studio Code, you should use hotkeys, functionality for quick navigation,  search and replace symbols. In addition, you can install code extensions that provide even more functionality to increase development productivity.

In which ways can you extend the functionality of Visual Studio?

Visual Studio has a large selection of extensions available in the Visual Studio marketplace that you can easily install to extend its functionality.

The post Level-up your C++ productivity using Visual Studio Extensions first appeared on Tomato Soup.

What is a High Performer and How does G2 Determine It?

A high performer is a user satisfaction indicator that signifies high efficiency and capability of software.  The efficiency score is determined using special algorithms based on user feedback. It calculates an average user satisfaction score that depends on the software’s quality and existing features. In addition, the number and quality of received reviews are also taken into account.

A high performer award means that the majority of a program’s users have rated the software highly effective for its tasks.  It is something that lives up to its claims and more. The only thing separating a high performer from industry leader status is a higher review count.

What does Visual Assist do?

Visual Assist is a productivity plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio that improves IDE functionality using a variety of techniques such as static code analysis. Visual Assist fills gaps in the coding experience of Visual Studio and allows developers to code faster, easier, and with fewer errors. It provides code understanding, code correction, code assistance, code suggestions, and code inspection features.

The main features provided by Visual Assist:

• Syntax highlighting.
• Enhances code suggestions.
• The ability to easily navigate to any file, method, symbol, or reference in your projects and solutions.
• Automatically code generation.
• Code refactoring tools.
• The possibility of using ready-made code snippets.
• Code auto-completion.
• Identifies and fixes typical programming errors.
• Ability to check spelling in comments.
• Support development for Unreal Engine.

How did users reviews for Visual Assist go?

In general, users highly rated the effectiveness of Visual Assist. They noted that this tool is necessary when working with a large code base, it significantly speeds up the process of writing code thanks to the IntelliSense system, fast navigation, powerful tools for refactoring, and code autogeneration.

Visual Assist received an overall score of 4.6 out of 5 stars. In other ratings, he has the following points:

• Ease of use – 9.2 out of 10.
• Quality of support – 9.1 out of 10.
• Ease of admin – 10 out of 10.

Be sure to download a free trial of Visual Assist and leave us a review after!

The post Visual Assist enters G2 Awards as High Performer first appeared on Tomato Soup.

If you haven’t updated yet, download the latest release here.

Parser changes

One of the highlights of this release is improvements to Visual Assist’s parser. The parser is core to how Visual Assist understands (and therefore suggests) code.

Numerous upgrades and fixes have been undertaken to make the parser smarter. This makes it recognize modern C++ code standards and practices, thereby minimizing unwanted behavior as well. Here are some of them:

• Now distinguishes between std::get and std::tuple.
• Now understands parameters declared with “out int” in C#
• Fixed parser getting confused with case’1′ inside switch statement.

Expect a steady stream of updates to parser behavior. If you encounter any bugs or errors submit a bug report on our community forums.

Support for C++17’s structured bindings

With the parser changes, VA 2022.4 also includes added support for C++17’s structured bindings. Structured bindings enable users to declare multiple variables initialized from a tuple or struct, simplifying and improving code readability.

VA’s improved parser recognizes structured bindings introduced in C++17, adding support for VA features such as code suggestion and navigation.

With this change, variables that are contained within the binding are now recognized. For example, typing a dot will now be properly colored and displayed on the navigation bar. You can also rename, search, and perform all the other actions you would expect from VA.

Continued HLSL improvement

The recently-added High Level Shading Language (HLSL) support has been augmented with coloring support for a variety of file types. This includes matrix types double4x2 and fixed3x4, and some base types such as min10float3. Because HLSL typically lacks corresponding header files, a more sophisticated understanding of code was required.

For those who are unaware, official HLSL support shipped with the previous release. HLSL and Unreal’s USF and USH files now integrate with VA’s core features.

Respecting VSCode excludes config files

Visual Assist now includes an option to consider configuration instructions similar to those used in VSCode settings .json files. This comes at the request of those who wish to skip unnecessary parsing when building solutions. 

This means that you can open a file without needing to parse an entire project or a solution, saving precious time. This is a way to essentially tell Visual Studio and Visual Assist to “open a file but do not parse anything else apart from a specific part.”

Enable the option to detect and honor exclude settings via ticking a checkbox in Visual Assist options. Here is an example of a configuration file with exclude settings:

An example configuration that VA will now recognize. Note: The actual JSON files are often configured in VS Code itself through a UI.

A new code inspection

This release also adds an inspection for bugprone-string-integer-assignment—a check based on LLVM/Clang-Tidy. It checks for easy-to-miss instances of assigning an integer to  std::basic_string<CharT> (std::string, std::wstring, etc.).

Access other code inspections by accessing the following:
(If you are not seeing options, please remember to enable code inspections!)

• Quick Actions and Refactorings menu ( Shift + Alt + Q ) 
• VAssistX ->> Code Inspection (beta) ->> VA Code Inspection Results

Minor bug fixes

• Fixed comments getting duplicated in tooltips.
• Fixed issue where VA’s tooltips would not appear if IntelliSense was disabled
• Fixed issue where VA Outline tooltip spreads across two monitors with different DPI settings could cause the system to freeze.
• Fixed issue where tomato icon may become black on hover in VS 2022
• Fixed issue where class method name that begins with “using” is missing from MIF.

For more information about the changes in this release, head on over to the documentation. We hope you find these changes useful. Happy coding!

The post Visual Assist 2022.4 now available first appeared on Tomato Soup.

In this blog post, we try to guesstimate the value of Visual Assist as a productivity and time-saving tool.

Why do developers need Visual Assist?

Before we dive into the numbers, we first need to understand why having Visual Assist is needed in the first place.

Technically speaking, VA is not necessary to code in Visual Studio. However, some developers can attest that there are projects that are almost infeasible to do without tools like VA. 

For instance, those working with large C++ source code may find that the IDE’s built-in features can choke on resource-intensive processes. In this case, users will greatly benefit from VA’s highly performant and context-aware features that have been specifically designed to support the areas where Visual Studio needs it.

Now let’s do some simple calculations with some hypothetical scenarios. You will soon find out that the opportunity cost in having Visual Assist is so low and the return on investment so high that there is simply no reason to ever code without it again.

Visual Assist for Developers

For developers, the benefit of having a performant and light coding assistant is pretty easy to understand. With VA installed, coding is simply faster and easier. With a slew of features designed to support even the highly complex C++ language, developers can focus on more important tasks.

The amount a developer spends wouldn’t define the usefulness of VA. A better metric to look at would be how productive it makes you or how much time it saves. 

In one of Visual Assist’s reviews, a game developer describes VA as “absolutely needed for professional programming in Visual Studio.” He explains how the features provided are basic—so much so that he was surprised that Visual Studio shipped without it in the first place.

A VA user testimonial. Read more reviews on G2.com

Disclosure: Ryan has since been recognized as a Whole Tomato MVP, but this review was submitted prior.

The value of Visual Assist for developers is that it makes development work faster and easier. It’s like investing in a good quality mouse—the regular one will do the job just too, but the added macros, extra buttons, and smoother experience in a premium mouse just feels better and more productive. You get the same results, just faster and with fewer inputs.

Visual Assist for Teams and Businesses

Project managers and developer leads are in a perpetual search of ways to make the most out of eight hours. These are the people whose decisions influence others, so they are usually more results-driven.

An analysis of our user surveys and focus group responses show that VA can increase productivity by around 20%. This means that having Visual Assist effectively reduces a 40-hour work effort to about 32 hours.

Here is an estimated-cost-savings matrix of an average project with and without Visual Assist:

Visual Assist can save teams 48-hours and $1,900 for a project that normally takes 10 work days.

VA helps maintain code by analyzing projects for technical errors and code smells. It catches issues as teams are writing code, saving them time during the testing and integration phase.

And since VA is regularly updated, the automatic prompts and corrections it suggests are always based on the latest coding and linter standards. Overall, it makes maintaining and testing code less tedious and time consuming.

These suggestions, no matter how minuscule, add up and save teams and businesses valuable time. They don’t have to spend extended periods of time manually checking code—meaning they can skip a considerable chunk of the development process.

Here are a couple of VA’s time saving features:

• Refactoring
• Code inspections
• Code debugging help
• And more…

It’s a bit complicated to estimate how efficient code maintenance practices and tools translate into time savings, but think of it this way: for each project, how much time does your team spend on finding, fixing, and testing errors, both minor and major,? 

Easily deploy Visual Assist

VA is a VS plugin and can be easily deployed. It does not matter if you install it before or during a project. Deploying with Visual Studio is a no-frills process with no additional investment for hardware required.

It has no known compatibility issues, so it should work with any other plugin you may have installed. Its features are customizable, so you can choose which functions to use and which to disable.

Get started with Visual Assist and experience a better and faster Visual Studio today.

The post How much time and money does Visual Assist save? first appeared on Tomato Soup.

If you’re in the market for your or your team’s SaaS fix, you’re in luck. This article will make your research a bit easier. In this blog, we discuss the value of one of the most powerful productivity extensions in Visual Studio and why plugins in general are still necessary in 2022.

What does Visual Assist do?

Visual Assist is a Visual Studio productivity plugin that is designed to help write C/C++ and C# code faster and easier.

VA does this by improving or adding built-in tools and features in Visual Studio with an efficient and a more powerful alternative. These benefits may manifest as more responsive menus, better code analysis tools, or even bespoke shortcuts that streamline complex processes into a single click.

Other articles can give a more complete explanation of what Visual Assist does, but in a nutshell, VA is a tool extension that improves a developer’s productivity.

How much is a developer’s time worth?

Not everyone realizes that time is the most expensive currency we exhaust every day. It is an indispensable and irreplaceable resource—and doubly so in the world of developers and programmers!

the average day for a developer costs a whopping $420…

Did you know that the average day for a developer costs a whopping $420? That’s around $3,000 weekly. That is why it is in the best interest of businesses and teams that the majority of a developer’s eight-hour workday is focused on actual programming. However, this also means that developers are getting pressured with shorter development cycles. A 2020 research found that codebases are increasingly getting larger, and pressure to deliver projects faster has increased in the past 10 years. And as larger and more complex codebases became the norm, demand for tools to support C++ developers has also ballooned.

From Sourcegraph: The Emergence of Big Code Survey

Is a Visual Studio code assistant the solution?

Going back to the main question, why is investing in Visual Studio extensions necessary? VS has made leaps and bounds in usability, efficiency, and support but the advantages are reduced due to increasing project requirements and time pressure.

For example,  there are still areas that lack extensive support and functionality. Game development projects, for instance, have resource-intensive tasks and unfamiliar syntax causing unintended behavior in the IDE. This unsupported niche is filled by plugins and is also why professionals need extensions to perform better. 

The core of development work is problem solving—not typing, navigating, or fixing syntax errors. They are part of the work, but they should not take more time than necessary. 

Visual Studio is a tool. Visual Assist is an enhancement. They are meant to simplify work and increase productivity. With increasing workloads and expectations, developers need to have more and better tools to produce quality work.

Dividing a developer’s attention into other tasks such as debugging small errors, shuffling through blocks of code, and waiting for builds to compile can stunt productivity—resulting in slower project turnaround time.

Some users may rely on native tooling, but as long as Microsoft cannot support every possible use case and application of Visual Studio, having performant plugins will still be a necessity for C/C++ developers. Besides, $129 for Visual Assist is a relatively low opportunity cost to get massive gains in productivity— making it an investment that pays for itself in as fast as two weeks.

The advantages of having Visual Assist

For those who transitioned to VS 2022, the shift to a 64-bit architecture has certainly fixed a few of the issues that long plagued the IDE. But a few problems persist to this day, such as:

• Tedious and repetitive tasks
• Superfluous processes
• Frustrating build and load times
• Unrecognized syntax and false errors

VA’s suite of features is specifically designed to alleviate these pain points with quick and responsive menus and options. “Fast performance is still one of [our] main advantages over other plugins,” notes Chris Gardner, lead developer of Visual Assist.

However, it’s also lightweight and works 100% alongside other VS plugins. “We believe it’s part of being a good member of the [plugin] ecosystem where [we] sit alongside others,” explains David Millington, a product manager of Embarcadero Technologies and Whole Tomato.

Visual Assist users can reallocate ~21% of their day to more pertinent tasks.

Feature Demo: example of time-saving feature (Code Inspection)

Here is a concrete example of how VA can save a ton of time. Code inspection is a nifty feature that checks code for quality issues and suggests the appropriate fixes.  

The two main advantages of Visual Assist over the native refactoring options are a) it automatically suggests corrections as you’re working on it, and b) it works just as well on large codebases.

Check out Visual Assist’s code inspection in action:

A webinar hosted by Visual Assist lead developer, Chris Gardner

Give Visual Assist a spin

If you’re still unsure whether investing into a small plugin is worth it, VA offers a 30-day trial for free. Experience it for yourself and see why VA users cannot go back to vanilla Visual Studio.

The post Why It’s Necessary to Invest in Visual Studio Extensions first appeared on Tomato Soup.

What are the benefits of using Visual Studio for software development?

Visual Studio is an integrated software development environment that allows you to create console and desktop applications, websites, and web services. Visual Studio for UE4 allows you to easily create beautiful and realistic 3D games.

Visual Studio is a modern and powerful IDE that includes a code editor, a built-in debugger, a form editor for creating an application’s graphical interface, and a web editor. Visual Studio Unreal Engine provides an advanced set of tools for creating modern games.

You can perform application testing, versioning, and deployment to the cloud using features provided by Visual Studio. If you want to extend its functionality you can install additional third-party plugins.

Visual Studio is one of the most used IDEs for C++ software development. Millions of developers from large and small organizations use it.

What is Unreal Engine, and what is it for?

Unreal Engine is a very powerful and popular engine for creating 3D graphics. It is a large system of tools and editors that allows you to create and manipulate 3D objects and scenes.

This modern engine allows you to create games for most modern operating systems and portable devices. It supports various rendering and audio playback systems, text-to-speech tools, speech recognition, modules for working with the network, and various input devices.

You can use Unreal Engine to develop games of various genres. Besides, you can use it for architectural and automotive visualization, linear film and television content creation, broadcast and live event production, training and simulation, and other real-time applications.

How to set up Visual Studio for Unreal Engine?

You can integrate Unreal Engine with Visual Studio, which allows you to easily and quickly make changes to the code and instantly see the results of its work after compilation.

To use Visual Studio together with UE4, first, you need to set up your Visual Studio. In the Visual Studio installer, select Game development with C++ in the Workloads tab. Also, you need to select these additional options: C++ profiling tools, C++ AddressSanitizer, Windows 10 SDK, and Unreal Engine installer. After that, install the selected tools.

Then you should use the Epic Games Launcher, which provides you the ability to install Unreal Engine if it is not already installed on your system.

How to work with Unreal projects in Visual Studio?

To create a new project, use the Unreal editor. You can use Blueprints or C++ code.

When you select C++ code, the Visual Studio solution is generated automatically.

With the Unreal editor, you can open the created project in Visual Studio. To do this, use the menu command File -> Open Visual Studio.

This command will open a Visual Studio solution with two projects. One project is for the Unreal Engine code. The other is your game project code, named the same as your Unreal project. After that, you can edit, build and debug your Unreal game using advanced features provided by Visual Studio.

What are the benefits of Unreal Engine developments in Visual Studio?

Visual Studio is widely used by C++ game developers. It is a proven and one of the most popular code editors. It is the recommended IDE for game development using Unreal Engine.

When developing games using Visual Studio, you can take advantage of the features provided by IntelliSense to significantly speed up the coding process.

Visual Studio also provides an excellent C++ debugger for Unreal Engine, similar to the one used to debug other C++ projects.

There is an UnrealVS extension for Visual Studio Unreal Engine that makes it easy to add launch options and create a lot of configurations at the same time. UnrealVS allows you to set up startup items, create bindable commands for compiling startup projects, set command line parameters, compile projects in batches, quickly compile the project menu, and much more.

Also, Visual Studio provides the ability to install additional C++ extensions to extend its functionality for game development using Unreal Engine. Visual Assist is one of these C++ extensions.

How Visual Assist for Unreal Engine supports developments in Visual Studio?

Visual Assist constantly releases updates and supports all new versions of Unreal Engine. This C++ extension offers advanced features for easier navigation, refactoring, code generation, and much more for your Unreal Engine projects.

Visual Assist provides features that increase developer productivity. You can rename resources with Core Redirect. This is an Unreal feature that keeps track of old and new names to keep code and blueprints that refer to the old name. Visual Assist can add this information when renaming. This feature allows you to rename without having to worry about the game crashing.

When you rename a class, file, method, variable, and any other type or object, all of its uses, including comments, lines, and headers are renamed automatically.

In addition, Visual Assist allows you to quickly type code using smart suggestions for U*Macro specifiers. For newly entered specifiers, Visual Assist quickly finds and displays suggestions.

Visual Assist automatically adds a superclass call to the template when extending the functionality of the engine. This reduces the number of steps you have to perform manually.

With Visual Assist, you can quickly and easily navigate through code and perform refactorings. To do this, use functions such as Goto, find links, rename, and change the signature. The ability to read U*Macro specifiers optimizes these functions.

Visual Assist allows you to speed up the process of studying documentation by displaying comments from base classes for Unreal Engine C++ and U*Macro specifiers in the code. With Visual Assist, you can easily and quickly learn Unreal Engine.

In this article, we looked at the main advantages of developing modern 3D games using the Visual Studio Unreal Engine. Install the Visual Assist C++ extension for Visual Studio with Unreal Engine support and develop exciting games faster and easier.

The post What Is Visual Studio For Unreal Engine, And Why Does It Matter? first appeared on Tomato Soup.