A colleague of mine that works every day on c++ told me not to pay a cent for Vissual Assist because nearly 100% of the most important functionality is already implemented on this year’s version of VS (2017)
Im using VS 2017 and I can say VA makes it even easier, and it even improves the functionality. For me is like texturing with Photoshop and Subtance Painter, once you try Painter you won’t go back.
It’s not enough for it to be “implemented”. For unreal intellisense is unusable slow, meanwhile VA has instant results for you.
Not too mention the convenience of Find Symbol pane, Open File in Solution window and many other QoL improvements.
Lately, Visual Assist also got may UE4-specific features, i.e. displaying possible UProperty/UFunction properties. Engine’s symbols are parsed only once, not for every new solution. And so on…
If you use “Include What You Use” in your projects you are pretty much required to use Visual Assist. Since it auto-completes all symbols even if you didn’t include their headers, you can start using whatever classes you want first and include later by right-clicking on them without having to find out which headers to include.
VA isn’t a panacea, however. It’s speed doesn’t come without compromises. It can only be as fast as it is because it’s “dumber” than Intellisense by “just” being a symbol database, without any of the error checks Intellisense does. If you code with only VA enabled, you’ll have to wait until compilation to find out if the code you just wrote is valid. Thus, it would be nice if there was a way to make Intellisense faster.