Visual Studio Blog

A new MSBuild editing experience

March 27, 2024 Mar 27, 2024 03/27/24

Mikayla Hutchinson

MSBuild is a fundamental part of the .NET development experience, but it can be challenging to new and experienced developers alike. To help developers better understand their project files and access advanced functionality that requires editing the project file directly, we’re releasing an experimental MSBuild editor that has a much richer...

2023 – a year of community experiments

January 9, 2024 Jan 9, 2024 01/9/24

Mads Kristensen

As we enter a new year, we wanted to catch you up on several experiments your feedback and participation helped us fine tune over the course of 2023. A community experiment is when we identify features believed to increase user productivity and happiness, and then build and test it with the community of Visual Studio users. These are ...

Naming Made Easy: AI-Powered Rename Suggestions

December 18, 2023 Dec 18, 2023 12/18/23

Dalia Abo Sheasha

(image) Ever struggled to name a variable, method, or class—finding that perfect balance between expressiveness and conciseness? You're not alone. We've tackled this universal challenge in the latest Visual Studio Preview via our GitHub Copilot Chat extension (subscription required). Introducing: AI-powered rename suggestions. This ...

Working with images just got easier in Visual Studio

August 28, 2023 Aug 28, 2023 08/28/23

Mads Kristensen

Any web, desktop, or mobile developer works with images often. You reference them from C#, HTML, XAML, CSS, C++, TypeScript, and even in code comments. Some images are local, and some exist online or on network shares, while others only exist as base64 encoded strings. We refer to them in numerous ways in code, but always as string values that...

Too many tabs open? No problem!

July 20, 2023 Jul 20, 2023 07/20/23

Mads Kristensen

When you have lots of tabs open in Visual Studio, your horizontal screen resolution determines how many will fit the Tab Well. The remaining document tabs won’t be shown unless you enable multi-row tabs. But what if you don’t want to lose the coding space multi-row tabs take up, and still need an easier way to get an overview of all your ...

Surround selection experiment

May 11, 2023 May 11, 2023 05/11/23

Mads Kristensen

You want to quickly select some text and surround it with quotation marks. So, you select your text and hit the quotation mark key on your keyboard, only to find that the selected text now has been replaced by a single “. What you hoped would happen was that the selected text would be surrounded by an opening and closing quotation mark like ...

Get your developer news

December 5, 2022 Dec 5, 2022 12/5/22

Mads Kristensen

Staying up to date with relevant news about your tech stack and virtual events is not always easy. There are lots of different sources and seeking out the information can be time-consuming. To help get you the information you need, we’re experimenting with bringing back Developer News inside Visual Studio – this time with some refreshing ...

Copy with proper indentation

October 25, 2022 Oct 25, 2022 10/25/22

Mads Kristensen

You want to share some code you’ve written with a colleague, so you select it in the editor and hit Ctrl+C to copy it. As you paste it in Outlook/Slack/Teams, you realize that the indentation levels are inconsistent due to your original selection. You must now either go back to Visual Studio and do a box selection and copy that, or manually ...

Comparing files in Visual Studio

October 4, 2022 Oct 4, 2022 10/4/22

Mads Kristensen

As developers, we often need to compare two files to find the differences. Sometimes, even comparing the content of the clipboard with a file on disk. And again, sometimes comparing our local changes to previous versions from our Git commit history. There is no straightforward way in Visual Studio to do those things today, but in this month’...

Adding color to bracket pairs

September 5, 2022 Sep 5, 2022 09/5/22

Mads Kristensen

When dealing with deeply nested brackets in Visual Studio, it can be hard to figure out which brackets match and which do not. For people with color blindness or other optic maladies, the problem can be even worse. By color-coding bracket pairs, we’re making this much easier. (image) Various IDE’s and editors offer this feature ...