Posts by this author

Jul 20, 2023
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Too many tabs open? No problem!

When you have lots of tabs open in Visual Studio, your horizontal screen resolution determines how many will fit the Tab Well. The remaining document tabs won’t be shown unless you enable multi-row tabs. But what if you don’t want to lose the coding space multi-row tabs take up, and still need an easier way to get an overview of all your open docum...

Experimentdocument management
May 11, 2023
Post comments count15
Post likes count7

Surround selection experiment

You want to quickly select some text and surround it with quotation marks. So, you select your text and hit the quotation mark key on your keyboard, only to find that the selected text now has been replaced by a single “. What you hoped would happen was that the selected text would be surrounded by an opening and closing quotation mark like in the ...

ExperimentEditor
Mar 1, 2023
Post comments count16
Post likes count15

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...

CopilotIntelliCodeArtificial Intelligence
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
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Post likes count14

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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Post likes count8

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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Post likes count7

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
Post comments count31
Post likes count22

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