Whole Tomato Software Boosts Visual Studio

Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Studio is getting a little help from a Tomato. Whole Tomato Software Inc., that is.

The Cupertino, Calif., company (www.wholetomato.com) is trying to improve programmer productivity by adding word processing editor-like capabilities to the Visual Studio editor. Whole Tomato Software's Visual Assist product is an add-in designed to work with Visual Studio 97.

"Today's word processors have more intelligence than parts of the development environment. Take on-the-fly correction of typing mistakes for example. We aim to make the development environment equally as savvy," says Jeff Straathof, president of Whole Tomato Software.

Visual Assist's list of features includes enhanced format, symbol expansion, correct case, context-sensitive find, one-step help and a tool called mini-help.

Enhanced format adds style, highlights and color to program code in an effort to increase readability. John Pool, product designer at Whole Tomato Software, explains, "When a developer is going through a piece of code, he is going to scan through it like you would a newspaper looking for headlines. We have actually marked the code so that each place where objects are defined can be referenced very quickly, and each place where methods or functions are called is marked as well. We have taken syntax highlighting and brought it to a new level."

Remembering long symbol names and keeping track of variable case is a caveat to modern programming. The symbol expansion and correct case features attempt to ease these dilemmas. "You can type in the beginning of a word, like 'set focus,' without typing capital SETFOC. You can just type 'setfo' and hit tab, and [Visual Assist] will prompt you with set focus," explains Pool.

Visual Assist also embeds an option in Visual Studio's find utility so it can search in a context-sensitive manner. Additionally, the context-sensitive find feature allows the replacement of all references to a specific symbol, allowing for easy variable name changes.

One-step help bypasses the traditional help relevant topic list and sends users directly to the desired help page. Mini-help provides onscreen context and definition information about a symbol. "If you click on any symbol, mini-help is going to show you foo.barr. That tells you that this is bar's actual foo as opposed to an overridden foo of some sort. Along with that, it tells you the definition. So if you click on barr it will tell you what its arguments are -- if it is a method, object or variable. It will tell you what it is defined as and what it is initialized to," explains Pool.

A free evaluation copy of Visual Assist is available on Whole Tomato Software's Web site.

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