Mads Kristensen

Principal Product Manager, Visual Studio

Mads Kristensen is a principal program manager on the Visual Studio team and has published over 150 free Visual Studio extensions. He blogs about anything related to Visual Studio and can often be found hosting various shows on the Visual Studio YouTube channel..

Post by this author

Documents and tool windows unleashed

January 24th, 2023
We’re continuing our video series with tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Visual Studio. This week is all about managing tool windows and documents. There are lots of options to customize how we layout the various windows, documents, and tabs that you use every day. Knowing about these features will help you optimize your usage ...

Five shortcuts to boost your productivity

January 9th, 2023
Taking full advantage of the Visual Studio editor features will make you a more productive developer. Any keyboard warrior will tell you that knowing the right shortcuts boosts that productivity even further. So, we’ve put together a short little video that demonstrates some useful shortcuts you can use while coding in Visual Studio. ...

Get your developer news

December 5th, 2022
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 ...

PHP in Visual Studio

November 3rd, 2022
PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for server-side web development. It's used in many frameworks and CSMs like WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, and others which are behind a sizable chunk of the Internet. Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, but its focus didn’t align with some languages, PHP being one of them. As time ...

Cool features in Visual Studio 2022

October 31st, 2022
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation at a conference about cool new features in Visual Studio 2022. It was a pre-recorded presentation, so I was able to do final edits to the video before sending it to the conference organizers. The result was a 38-minute-long video highlighting some of my favorite new features, tweaks, and extensions. And ...

Copy with proper indentation

October 25th, 2022
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 4th, 2022
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 5th, 2022
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. Various IDE’s and editors offer this feature today – ...

Differentiating Visual Studio instances

August 4th, 2022
When you have multiple instances of Visual Studio open at the same time, it can be tricky to tell them apart. Especially if you’re working on different branches of the same solution, which makes them look almost identical. What if each instance could have a unique color so you could instantly tell them apart? Would you use it? The ...

Visual Studio on an ultra-wide monitor

May 5th, 2022
A growing number of Visual Studio customers use ultra-wide monitors today. Ultra-wide means wider than a traditional 16:9 widescreen display – usually 3440x1440 or larger resolution. They seem to be gaining popularity among developers and I’m curious how Visual Studio can use all this extra space. So, I asked people on Twitter to send me ...

Feedback usabilla icon