The post What’s New in Visual Assist 2024—Featuring lightning fast parser performance [Webinar] first appeared on Tomato Soup.

Get ready to unwind with Whole Tomato at our first Summer C++ CodeFest! Join us for two weeks of laid-back learning, collaboration, and coding sessions. Expand your C++ coding skills and ignite your passion for coding in a join-when-you-can environment.

Why this virtual coding camp for?

C++ is one of the most established procedural and object-oriented programming languages but it has also undergone numerous revisions throughout its lifetime. What you may have learned from using prior versions as a wee developer in C++11 may have drastically changed in the most recent version of the C++ standard (C++20). 

But as C++ developers ourselves, we understand that keeping up with the ever changing standards may sometimes feel like an unnecessary chore—if what we’re using works, don’t fix it, right? 

And while it’s certainly cool to be using new stuff in itself, we feel that there are potential benefits from modern C++ that are extremely underutilized. Getting familiar with modern techniques and strategies such as lambdas, structured bindings, and the like can not only optimize performance, it can make our work much much faster and easier too!

This is why we are holding our first ever summer code fest! This is a two-week long event where in usual Tomato fashion, we present short, highly digestible sessions about specific practices you should know about and use in your everyday  C++ workflow. 

Who is this coding camp for?

Junior developers looking to expand their skill set with modern C++ practices and strategies, and intermediate C++ developers that are stuck in the old ways are all welcome to join. While we will be primarily using Visual Studio with some features provided by Visual Assist, anyone with a C++-capable IDE will be able to benefit.

What topics will be covered?

At the Summer CodeFest, we invite you to join our mini lectures on a variety of C++ topics, condensed into 30 to 45 minute sessions with additional time for audience Q&A. Some of our specialized topics will include concurrency structures, lambda functions, and C++ templates.  Here are other things you can expect to learn at our coding camp:

• The most important developments from C++ 11 all the way to C++ 20.
• Modern practices and strategies that you should be using regularly
• Life hacks and expert advice from our professional C++ presenters

Event Schedule

The Summer CodeFest will have four sessions, each ranging from 30 to 45 minute presentations.

• Session 1: Next-Level Concurrency: Enhancing Scalability with C++20
  

  with Chris Gardner
  Explore modern C++20 multithreading and powerful parallelism techniques. As programs get more complex, computers get equipped with even more CPU cores. Learn to optimize applications for peak performance with real-world examples and practical insights with C++20’s new concurrency features.
  August 8 – 10:00 AM CT

• Session 2: What the Hex? Ports and Adapters Architecture with C++
  

  with Nuno Castro
  In this session, we’ll dive into Hexagonal architecture. Explore how to build scalable applications effectively and address challenges with logic changes when refactoring code and maintaining application integrity during logic changes.
  August 10 – 10:00 AM CT
  

• Session 3: Modern C++ with Modern 3D
  

  with Yilmaz Yoru
  This is a journey to modern 3D with modern C++, we will walk you through to modern 3D in C++. Rotation matrix, vectors, Viewport3D, 3D objects, 3D engines, animation, and more.
  August 11 – 1:00 PM CT
  

• Session 4: Lambdas go Baa!
  

  with David Millington
  Many C++ developers still use functor objects instead of lambdas. That might be because they’re “ol’ reliable”, or lambdas seem complex, or there just seems no need. But lambdas are exciting, simpler than you think, and really useful.
  August 15 – 10:00 AM CT

• Session 5: Tips and Tricks using C++ Templates
  

  with Miguel Angel Moreno
  Discover the many ways you can take advantage of C++ templates in your day to day coding. Templates are a very useful feature of C++, yet many developers still think of them as “too complex” to use. In this presentation we will show you some tips and tricks that will encourage you to start using templates in your next coding project.
  August 16 – 11:00 AM CT

• Session 6: Magnificent or Malevolent? Maps! Measured, Monitored, & Magnified
  

  with David Millington
  Good old std::map. We use it everywhere. But what about some of the others? Like std::unordered_map — why would you use that? And is it true that the STL collections have inbuilt performance issues by design? Are there are collection classes out there that we could use instead?
  August 17 – 10:00 AM CT

The Summer CodeFest will be made up of multiple sessions organized and presented by a number of C++ experts, with some of our friends in the industry guesting for some of the sessions. You can choose which of these sessions you want to watch. Replays will also be provided but we encourage everyone to attend live so we can answer your questions and demonstrate them live to you. All content will be in English unless otherwise indicated.

Joining is easy and free. Sign up using the individual registration links or click this all-in-one link to register and add all of the sessions to your calendar. 

The post Summer CodeFest: C++ coding camp hosted by Whole Tomato first appeared on Tomato Soup.

The webinar and this recap blog are part of ongoing efforts to share more information around the latest Visual Assist updates and developments. Usually we publish what’s new in a bulletin, but we haven’t often had a webinar where we share what’s new and have live questions and answers. So we had one!

The webinar was hosted by Whole Tomato’s Chris Gardner (Lead Developer), David Millington (Product Manager), and Kyle Wheeler (General Manager).

If you want to skip ahead to specific parts, we’ve summarized the most important points and linked them to the appropriate section in the webinar.

An overview of Visual Assist and its features

In this section, Chris gives a brief rundown of Visual Assist features, and how Visual Studio users can benefit from the tool. And while this serves as a great introduction to new users, Chris imparts his years of knowledge and experience— making it a great reference even for those already familiar with the tool.

This section includes a quick summary of the key feature categories included in the Visual Assist package:

• Navigation
• Refactoring
• Code generation
• Other features

What makes Visual Assist a unique C++ productivity tool? 

“There’s a ton of features,” says Kyle Wheeler. The tool has been available for a few years and has seen many versions of Visual Studio. And with each version came “new complexities, challenges but also new opportunities”.

One of the main design principles of Visual Assist is finding gaps in Visual Studio and making them better. The native environment sometimes does not work in the most intuitive of ways or struggles “because C++ code is [relatively] complex”, which is why the tool tries to provide better options, if not outright replacements.

But apart from a lengthy list of added functionality, David Millington explains a few key benefits of having Visual Assist as a coding partner:

• Non-distracting, non-flashy  UI that shows up only when needed.
• Low memory usage,  making it perfect for large projects – we recently halved memory usage, and we were already pretty good
• Highly performant to parse and to provide results from parsing
• Parser can handle non-compiling code, i.e. code you’re in the middle of working on

Live Demo: Using Code Inspection to Modernize Code

Visual Assist inspects code for issues and automatically suggests a replacement according to latest standards.

Chris demoed one of Visual Assist’s refactoring tools that looks for code issues and automatically suggest the replacement code appropriate to the latest C++ coding standards.

This feature makes it easier to maintain older code bases or update legacy code to modern, and often safer and more performant, coding styles. For example, following the latest C++ Standard Template Library (STL) standard practices.

You can quickly apply all fixes in the code inspection results window.

Note: This feature is currently disabled by default. Turn it on via accessing Extensions > VAssistX > Code Inspection (beta). 

Live Demo: Accessing features (Navigation & Commands) 

Chris also gave a brief demo of the most popular Visual Assist features and their default/recommended shortcuts. He also shows a few tips and tricks to maximize these features.

• Refactoring Menu – a comprehensive dialog menu that shows a list of available actions depending on the highlighted symbol
• Go to related –  a strong navigational feature wherein you can jump to anywhere related to the current symbol
• Keyboard shortcuts – best way of finding and learning how to use new functions
• Open file in solution – a lightweight search window that lists all openable files
• Find symbols – a tool for finding and jumping to a symbol
• Code snippets – used to create, save, and insert snippets of code quickly

Chris and Kyle also gave a few tips on how to keep track of the many shortcuts and how to integrate them into you workflow.

What’s new in Visual Assist

Visual Studio 2022 support, Unreal Engine 5 parity, and more! These are just a few of the latest developments in the recent versions of Visual Assist. 

• Visual Studio 2022
  David explained how the shift to an x64 process affects Visual Studio coding, and also what it may mean in terms of new and exciting possibilities for Visual Assist.
• Unreal Engine 5
  Chris shared a bit on Unreal Engine 5: his firsthand experience with a UE5 demo, the troubles with development on Visual Studio, and how VA remains a highly necessary tool for UE development.

• Other notable updates
  David capped off the latest VA news with a list of key development points for Visual Assist in the past year.

The future of Visual Assist

The following bullet points are by no means official announcements, but they are ideas currently being considered by the product development team.

• Consolidating more Unreal Engine improvements
• Improving C# support and feature parity
• More refactoring options
• Visual Studio for ARM
• Taking advantage of new 64-bit architecture

Getting involved

This update webinar was a new effort for us. It may be useful to be able to ask questions and have the team answer them directly, so if you prefer these live sessions of what’s new in Visual Assist, do let us know so we can continue doing more in the future.

And if you have any other suggestions on what we should focus on next, feel free to shoot us a message on our support channel.

And if you know someone in the community who’s been a great help to your coding journey, let us know. They might be our next MVP. (It might even be you!) 

Viewing the webinar

The full webinar recording is available here. 

The post Recap: What’s New in Visual Assist 2022 first appeared on Tomato Soup.