We hope you find this release useful. Visit our website to download the release.

ARM support

Big news for Visual Assist’s device support! Windows ARM is now supported starting this release, Visual Assist 2024.4. Visual Assist is now available as a fully ARM-native plugin, fully supported in Visual Studio’s ARM build. This means that Visual Assist is now fully compatible for those of you using Macs or Windows devices with an ARM processor. 

We first asked our community about ARM support some time ago. At the time, while it was clear ARM was growing for Macs, it was unclear how strongly it would grow for Windows and we planned support at a future time. Since then, we’ve seen growing interest and customer requests – and we’re happy to deliver! The appearance we see is that many people, including large companies, are increasingly interested in or using ARM for Windows.

There are many advantages to using Windows ARM devices, from battery usage to performance. One key one is that many developers target ARM devices and are used to debug remotely; while debugging on-device or on-simulator remains important, it can be slow and doing minute-to-minute development on a device that shares the same CPU architecture can be very useful.

ARM is a completely new front for us and we would like to know more about how we can improve the experience for ARM users. If you’re part of the group that would benefit from this update, please let us know more by answering this short survey.

Path “/” delimiter

This simple change adds an option for users who are used to using “/” as path delimiters for searching directories. This comes at the heel of users from different operating systems sharing how their default style of delimiter is not supported. 

With this change, you can now choose what the default delimiter will be used. This will apply to most of Visual Assist’s search windows such as Open file in solution and the like.

Bug fixes and improvements

Apart from the above major fixes, we have a couple of minor bug fixes and QoL changes. The highlights are a fix for recognizing one of the features in the standard library. 

The complete list is below: 

• Fixed issue where std::tuple would not be recognized in some cases.
• Move Class to New File will no longer jump to a new file before showing the dialog.
• Fixed broken Discord invite link.

Send us a message or start a thread on the user forums for bug reports or suggestions. Don’t forget to join our Discord too!

Visit our download page to update to the latest release manually. Happy coding!

The post Visual Assist 2024.4 release post – ARM Support first appeared on Tomato Soup.

Visual Assist is a native plugin, so compiled for either 32-bit or 64-bit Intel depending on which version of Visual Studio you’re using. If you run the normal version of Visual Studio, this is exactly what you need. But if you run the ARM version, you would need an ARM build of Visual Assist, and we haven’t yet shipped one. That is, right now you can’t use Visual Assist using the ARM build of Visual Studio.

We have a history of supporting new versions of Visual Studio very close to release. When Visual Studio 2022 was announced, we spent many months moving Visual Assist to 64bit, including blogging about our progress and which preview builds of Visual Studio we suggested using our beta version with. So you might expect us to release an ARM build within a few days… but we are not.

First, we will support ARM. It’s coming. It’s important to us to be on all platforms where Visual Studio is.

Second, we’re not prioritizing as urgently as we did for Visual Studio 2022 support, for the simple reason that very few of our customers are expressing interest in it, including requiring it – ie moving to ARM for development and thus being unable to use Visual Assist. What we’ve seen is interest along the lines of,

• ‘Do you have any plans in your roadmap?’
• ‘Will there be support for ARM sometime in the future?’
• ‘I’d like to use Apple Silicon.’

Those are close to verbatim quotes from the inquiries we’ve got, and we have only a handful. None of the feedback we’ve been sent indicates an urgent need for it, just interest. And that’s why we’re working on it, but not as urgently.

Currently, and with the caveat nothing is promised until it’s GA-ed / shipped, that means first half 2023.

We want to check: is this the right decision for you?

Do you need ARM? Do you need it now? What’s your use case: why are you using ARM?

Please send us an email at support@wholetomato.com. We will read with interest!

– David Millington, Visual Assist Product Manager

The post Visual Assist and ARM first appeared on Tomato Soup.