2023’s Top 10 New Features for .NET in Visual Studio
The .NET team has been working hard all through 2023 to create innovative features to enhance the productivity and experience of .NET developers. This blog dives into James Montemagno’s favorite new .NET features in Visual Studio.
I was particularly interested in Dev Tunnels. One of the standout features introduced in Visual Studio during 2023. This feature has been a game-changer for developers seeking to expose their local development servers to the internet. It provides a unique URL that directly tunnels to your local machine, making it incredibly valuable for scenarios like mobile development where testing backend services across various devices is crucial.
No surprise, but James is also using the new Visual Studio extensions GitHub Copilot & GitHub Copilot Chat. GitHub Copilot (Free Trial) is an AI-powered assistant revolutionizes the coding experience by suggesting contextually relevant code snippets in real-time as developers’ type. Where GitHub Copilot Chat enables direct interaction with the AI to seek detailed assistance on coding challenges, enhancing productivity and efficiency. You have got to give these two extensions a try, the future is coming fast.
My favorite was the Git & PR Enhancements integrated in Visual Studio. Developers can now perform Git tasks such as branch creation, commits, and pull requests right from the IDE, streamlining the process of code repository management significantly. I can’t say enough about all the Git enhancements in Visual Studio, but Jessie Houghton does a good job capturing it all here.
James also discusses the new Accessibility Checker, .NET Aspire Orchestrator, the UI Refresh and the C# Dev Kit for Visual Studio Code. Go check it out.
Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements in 2024 from Visual Studio as we continue to evolve to meet the needs and wants of developers worldwide. Happy coding!
Jason Chlus Program Manager, Visual Studio
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9 comments
Top feature would be the following: be able to have two Visual Studio opened on a decent machine without each of them eating 4GB worth of memory and making the system unstable. Even a single VS with a medium-sized solution can bring a system on its knees… You add a lot of fancy things but I have the feeling that VS is turning into a bloatware – to satisfy all kind of developers – but whose core is never stabilized. I did not have that feeling before VS2015. I remember how VS2005/2008 were running perfectly and were “light”.
I always have 4 or more open at the same time, just checked Task manager, they are between 800MB and 1.6GB, not great but not that bad either.
How many .csproj in your solution? Mine has > 100.
I don’t think the problem is with VS if you have 100 projects in your solution. You could easily argue that having 1,000 projects open in VS is problematic. Exactly how much space should VS take up for each project in an ideal situation?
Personally I would argue that your solution is too large and, besides the VS usage, introduces lots of issues. Build times are probably not great. New devs are probably overwhelmed. It is unlikely that a single dev is working on all projects at the same time. The list goes on. Dividing your solution (which is literally just a virtual collection of projects) by related projects based upon how the dev teams works would solve most of these issues and your VS memory problem. You can still always build everything in your build system so this is just making it easier for devs.
I have solutions with 20 projects in them (including test projects) and a couple of copies of VS open and I haven’t run out of memory yet.
I used to have similar solutions back in VS2015 and it worked fine, with less resources. While I do agree that some solution refactoring should be considered, I still have the feeling that Visual Studio is getting sluggish over time. Just see the comment by Andreas Saurwein below, last years I kept seeing more and more feedbacks that were aligned with this and were reflecting my feeling. I would prefer that Microsoft focuses on existing features to improve them and stabilize things, like the “Manage Nugets packages…” screen that is unbearable instead of adding another feature to close the gap with Visual Code. For some reasons, I feel that “something” has changed in VS when Resharper stopped being usable in terms of performance (I don’t use it anymore). Could be linked to Roslyn and deep internal architectural changes.
That’s amazing!I have wished them to solve the problems when we use it.Now they success.I hope l will be happy to use this.
I would like to see the developers time spent on useful features like stability and security instead of things like UI Refresh. Much has improved this year, but much has been added that makes not much sense for the core developers using C#/C++.
I share your view (see my comments above) and would like that MS focuses on stability instead of adding features
We want VB Net back