Posts by this author

Mar 1, 2023
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GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022

GitHub Copilot uses OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time right from your editor. Trained on billions of lines of public code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts including comments and method names into coding suggestions across dozens of languages. In Visual Studio, Copilot acts as a pair-programmer making it mo...

IntelliCodeArtificial IntelligenceCopilot
Jan 24, 2023
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Documents and tool windows unleashed

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 of Visu...

Tips and Tricksvideo
Jan 9, 2023
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Five shortcuts to boost your productivity

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. In the ...

Developer ProductivityEditor
Dec 5, 2022
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Get your developer news

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 updates. ...

Experiment
Nov 3, 2022
3
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PHP in Visual Studio

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 progressed more ...

php
Oct 31, 2022
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Cool features in Visual Studio 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 the be...

video
Oct 25, 2022
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Copy with proper indentation

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 fix the...

Experiment
Oct 4, 2022
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22

Comparing files in Visual Studio

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’s exper...

Experimentdiff
Sep 5, 2022
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Adding color to bracket pairs

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 – usually done ...

ExtensionsAccessibilityExperiment
Aug 4, 2022
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Differentiating Visual Studio instances

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 Peacock ex...

ExtensionsExperiment