This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release.

RAD Studio 12 is just around the corner, with our release webinar this Thursday! Back in August, we gave a preview webinar of what is being worked on internally for C++, covering a preview of the updated Clang compiler, and our initial integration of Visual Assist.

The thing is, we held out a little. The preview was quite conservative. We didn’t share everything. In fact, we only shared about a third of what we’re shipping for Visual Assist.

So what’s coming?

In the August webinar, we shared that there are three areas for features in the initial implementation: code completion, refactoring and navigation. So, here’s a few teasers for what you’ll see on Thursday and what you’ll be able to use when you install C++Builder 12.0.

Code completion

What’s interesting about this image?

Hint: It shows code completion doing something that it could never do before in C++Builder. Something pretty magical.

Lots more to say about code completion, and Code Insight in general, but we’ll show it on Thursday! Let’s move right along…

Refactoring

In the preview webinar, we showed one refactoring, Rename. And a rename refactoring is really useful, it would be great to have just that in the first version!

But here’s the Refactor menu in C++Builder 12.0:

Rename and… three other items.

That’s four items when we previewed one.

So what are they? Well, the remaining three are not quite refactorings per se (they won’t rewrite or move around code) so much as a kind of code generation, doing or creating something useful for you. The first one is pretty amazing – magical, in fact. I smile every time I use it. The third and fourth are smaller, and are two versions of the same feature (each operation is the inverse of the other one.)

What could they be?

Navigation

In the preview webinar, we previewed Find References — an incredibly useful feature to find where any symbol (method, class etc) is used, or referred to, in your code — and Find Symbol, a feature to find any symbol anywhere in your project group or the headers it uses or… anywhere.

But look at this.

Four other menu items.

The bottom two are small: a Delphi feature that happens to be one of the most-requested navigation features for C++Builder. (They’re two aspects of the same feature, one being the inverse of the other. And though small we think those of you who’ve asked for it will love seeing it added. It’s not actually an existing Visual Assist feature, we added it into Visual Assist specially for C++Builder!)

The top two?

They’re bigger.

What could they be?

Well, one opens a dialog. A useful dialog.

One, however, opens another menu. This menu:

Look at it. Lots more functionality appears.

Not only that, but there are submenus. What could they contain?

This menu can be invoked another way too, by the way.

And for what it’s worth, in the launch webinar I refer to this feature as the most amazing feature ever.

What could it be?

C++Builder and RAD Studio 12 are out any day now!

In August, we previewed Visual Assist and it was looking very exciting. But we’re shipping even more than expected. And it’s really useful. Delphi developers who’ve seen this have been jealous. We think C++ developers are going to love version 12.

Want to learn what you’ll get in the C++Builder 12.0 IDE? Join our webinar! We have a whole section on Visual Assist and I personally think adding it to RAD Studio is one of the best things we’ve ever done. The webinar is this Thursday!

This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release.