Visual Studio is one of the most popular and powerful IDEs which provides a lot of advanced features for developing C++ applications. In addition, it is possible to extend its functionality using the C Extension For Visual Studio.
This C++ code maker allows you to create mobile, desktop, web applications, web services, websites, and games. Visual Studio provides a convenient editor for writing code, and advanced features for navigating through code, fixing errors, refactoring, debugging, and testing code. In addition, it is possible to install a C++ extension that allows you to add features to your IDE and customize it for yourself.
With all the convenience and benefits that Visual Studio provides, there are also a number of issues that C++ developers who use this IDE face. In this article, we will take a look at the most popular problems and ways you can fix them.
What problems do C++ developers face?
Large projects and legacy code
Working with pointers
C++ is an insecure and complex programming language
Multi-threaded development
Building a fast and reliable application
System testing
Game development
How does Visual Studio help solve the challenges developers face?
Quickly navigate code
Code refactoring tools
Benefits of debugging
What support does Visual Assist provide for game development?
What problems do C++ developers face?
Large projects and legacy code
When working with large projects, a very important issue is the ability to quickly and easily navigate code. There is a need to quickly go to dependencies and search for objects and symbols in the project. In addition, when working with legacy code, it is often necessary to do a lot of refactoring. At the same time, it is important that the refactoring process does not affect the system’s behavior. Therefore, developers need automatic tools that help track all changes in the code and offer auto-corrections.
Working with pointers
You need to work with pointers in C++ programming language. Developers manage their creation and destruction after their use is no longer needed. Working with pointers is quite complicated, and mistakes made can lead to memory leaks or application crashes.
C++ is an insecure and complex programming language
C++ does not have a built-in garbage collector, so developers must manually clean unused memory. In addition, this language has complex syntax, friend functions, and multiple inheritances.
Multi-threaded development
Working with parallel threads in C++ is quite tricky because it doesn’t provide a ready-made solution for this. Therefore, it is important not only to correctly design and implement the work of threads, but also to be able to debug them. So it is important for developers to have advanced tools for debugging multi-threaded programs.
Building a fast and reliable application
In addition to ensuring the smooth operation of the program, it is also important that it works efficiently. To do this, you need to monitor the number of resources used by the program, such as CPU, memory, network usage, and user interface response speed.
System testing
When developing a large system, it is often difficult to manually find and fix all the errors. Also, after fixing them, they may appear again. To avoid this, it is very important to have powerful automatic testing tools that allow you to quickly find and correct newly made errors.
Game development
When developing modern games, programmers use special tools for creating objects, scenes, effects, animations, etc. It is very important to be able to easily and efficiently integrate these tools into the development environment.
How does Visual Studio help solve the challenges developers face?
Visual Studio provides basic tools for code navigation, refactoring, debugging, and testing. If you have a need to extend the basic functionality, you can install different extensions for Visual Studio.
Visual Assist for Visual Studio C++ lets you write code quickly and easily. This C++ extension adds all the missing features to create any type of application.
Quickly navigate code
The Visual Assist C++ extension provides the ability to quickly navigate from the current object to related data. Using the context menu or hotkeys, you can quickly go to the implementation of the selected symbol. This can be done from code, comments, and hashtags. After that, you can easily return to the place where the quick jump was taken from.
You can also easily navigate to dependencies. For example, to a base, derived class, or constructor.
Visual Assist allows you to quickly go to members of a class, structure, interface, enum, or namespace.
A very useful feature is the ability to view all classes, structures, methods, events, properties, and enums in a file. You can search for them, sort them, quickly switch between them and select only the types you need to display.
Code refactoring tools
To simplify working with pointers, Visual Assist allows you to automatically convert from a pointer object to a reference object and vice versa. Automatic conversion occurs both in the declaration of the object and in all places where it is used.
The C extension for Visual Studio allows you to automatically move the selected code to a new file. You can also move the method from the header file to the source file, and create a new method or variable from the selected code. You can quickly access these features using hotkeys or the context menu.
Benefits of debugging
Visual Assist C++ extension provides an Address Resolver. You can use it when debugging native C/C++ code to make it easier to decipher text addresses and call stacks. It determines the valid virtual addresses for text input by loading and reading EXE, DLL, and PDB modules whose symbols the input refers to. Having received a text address, Address Resolver searches the loaded modules for a character at this address. Due to this, all virtual addresses in the address input are converted to a character.
Another advanced tool is PDB Explorer. It allows you to debug C/C++ native code when the source code is not available. PDB Explorer allows you to view and search for symbols in modules that contain executable code, whether or not that code is in a running process. It can also tell the Visual Studio debugger to navigate to symbol locations in virtual memory. PDB Explorer allows you to efficiently find symbols in EXE files and DLLs.
Visual Assist extends the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio by adding a command to skip breakpoints. You can skip one breakpoint or all at once. When you use this command, enabled breakpoints remain enabled but are automatically skipped. When you re-execute the command, the enabled breakpoints break the application in the debugger, as they must work.
What support does Visual Assist provide for game development?
Visual Assist supports the development of modern 3D games using Unreal Engine. It offers customized navigation, refactoring, and code generation for Unreal projects.
You can significantly speed up the coding process by using smart suggestions for U*Macros. This C++ extension also provides features that replace the standard IntelliSense, which often does not work correctly for Unreal projects.
If you want to increase your development productivity with Visual Studio C++, install the free trial version of the C++ Visual Assist extension and enjoy building your applications.
