Help us improve Visual Studio project tooling for .NET Core

We’re currently planning our next set of investments in Visual Studio project tooling for .NET. This tooling, called a project system, sits at the heart of nearly every major action you perform when writing .NET code in Visual Studio.

What is the .NET project system?

The .NET project system is a set of components that power nearly everything you do in Visual Studio with .NET. It’s the “plumbing” that moves data to and from Solution Explorer, designer tooling, language services and IntelliSense, the debugger, build and publish actions, configuration, and more.

The .NET project system is also responsible for several UI experiences in Visual Studio. Solution Explorer, project property pages, the dependencies node, project files editing, various menus, and several tooling windows (such as the RESX and settings designers). It’s very broad in scope.

The .NET project system is also a significant player in various performance-related topics:

Time until Solution Explorer is ready for you to interact with
Time until you get full IntelliSense in C#/VB/F# files
Build times for your solution
Behavior of various parts of Visual Studio when branching with source control
and others

The team tracks metrics for these things with the goal to improve them over time.

How to help

As mentioned, we’re planning some things to do next. Things like quality and performance improvements are already on the table, and you can engage with the team on GitHub if you’d like to get involved more. If you have an idea for a new feature or enhancement, feel free to file an issue!

Additionally, we’d love it if you could take a minute and fill out a quick survey. It will help us prioritize certain areas of the .NET project system:

Take the survey!

Thanks, and happy coding!

Author

Phillip Carter

Program Manager

Phillip is a PM on the .NET team, focusing on the F# language, F# documentation, F# tooling, and project system tooling. He wishes he had more time to code, but that doesn't stop him from having fun with people on GitHub. He loves functional programming and language-related tooling, and is always available to chat about wild and wacky ways to make programming more enjoyable.