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I have downloaded the latest Visual Studio Community and InteliSense seems to work well even without the Visual Assist plugin, save a few bugs. I'd therefore like to continue working without the plugin.

I had plenty of code snippets in Visual Assist. How can I migrate them to visual studio 2017 without Visual Assist?

Tomáš Zato
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I can get you started:

Visual Studio expects XML: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/walkthrough-creating-a-code-snippet

Visual Assist stores its snippets in a legacy, non-XML format. Fortunately, you can "export" XML using the VA Snippet Editor. Open the editor; multi-select in the list; copy; paste into an external editor.

If the snippets you want to export share words in their descriptions or follow a pattern, you can simplify the multi-select by limiting what appears in the list. Change the Type dropdown to "Search", then search a field by string or regex.

I don't have a convenient way to convert from one XML format to the other.

Jeff
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  • Jeff you know how I can import my Visual Assist .tpl snippets on my Visual Studio Visual Assist running on another machine? If I simply go to Visual Assist Options -> Performance -> Export & then I copy paste those regedit file AND my .tpl files and paste them on the corresponding directory on the other machine, will I be good to go? Do I need to do anything else? – KeyC0de Oct 23 '18 at 00:12
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    Copy-and-paste as you describe should work. You can also copy the directory %APPDATA%\VisualAssist\Autotext from one machine to another. If you put your VA Snippets on a shared resource, you can modify the registry on your two PCs to use a common set of VA Snippets. Doing so makes modified VA Snippets available without another copy-and-paste. See: https://support.wholetomato.com/default.asp?W433 – Jeff Oct 24 '18 at 01:29
  • And to reimport those snippets to Visual Assist, just open the VA Snippet Editor again and paste the XML content back! I know the OP does not want to use VA anymore, but since the question title doesn't mention that I stumbled upon this page when searching how to import snippets provided by other people as XML. – hsandt Apr 03 '19 at 15:13