Over the last year, we’ve been building a better Extension Manager for Visual Studio that makes it easier for you to find and install great extensions. Along the way, we’ve invited Visual Studio Preview users to try out the new design and share their feedback with us. Using all that amazing feedback, we added features, made improvements, and fixed bugs. With the official release of Visual Studio 17.9, we’re ready to make the new Extension Manager available to everyone as a preview feature!
The new Extension Manager design
This design is all about maximizing space for the content you care about when searching for extensions. In addition to the refreshed UI for the list of extensions in your search results, we now include a large window showing the detailed description for the selected extension.
Using search filters
If you want to filter the search results by category, use the filter icon in the toolbar to show the category and subcategory dropdown menus. You can use the filters to search specifically for coding tools, for example, or to only show C# templates.
Try the new Extension Manager and share your feedback with us!
The new Extension Manager is available for all users starting with Visual Studio 17.9, which is available today!
To get access to the updated design, enable the preview feature by clicking on Tools > Manage Preview Features and making sure that the box for the feature called Extension Manager UI Refresh (requires restart) is checked. After you restart Visual Studio, you’ll find the new Extension Manager at Extensions > Manage Extensions.
As mentioned above, we can’t bring you the best features without your help, so please share your thoughts and feedback with us on this ticket on Developer Community! Also, if you try the new design for a while and decide you want or need to return to the original design, we’d love to hear from you about what’s missing or how we can improve.
If you run into any bugs or issues, please report them so we can prioritize fixing them.
I do not see currently installed version and newest version side by side.
I turn off this preview feature, because it’s not showing the downloading progress, and I think it use the webview2 in right panel, but it seems not handle it for close the extension tab, and start a new browse windows each time the extension tab create
Thanks for your feedback, John. To help me better understand your issues so we can investigate, could you please provide some additional detail and/or screenshots on our Feedback ticket. Thanks!
Are extensions synchronized between devices? That’s a feature that does not exist as far as I know.
Thanks for the question, Carlos! For more information, please see my answer to Morten above. The basic gist is that extensions are synchronized across devices through the roaming tab in the extension manager, but we know the roaming experience isn’t quite up to user expectations. We’re gathering feedback on our Roaming feedback ticket to make sure we’re capturing users’ needs so we can design the best experience. Please provide feedback on that ticket if you have any thoughts!
I Think I found a bug:
I have multiple extensions to update.
I select ‘Update All’
It gets confused which update to download – it tried to download the same extension twice.
And when closing VS, no updates are performed.
Also, it would be nice if the update tab header would show that there are updates.
Now I have to go to the update tab to see if there are updates.
Thanks for the bug report. If that happens to you again, could you please use the Report a problem feature to create a ticket so we can look at the logs and make sure we’ve got the right issue. That’s something we definitely want to solve. Then, you can link your ticket to the overall Feedback ticket and we’ll take a look.
Great feedback about the update tab header!