Community Feedback Building 17.8 & 17.9 Preview 1

Jason Chlus

The Visual Studio team depends on community feedback from all users to help create, design, and improve Visual Studio. We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio version 17.8 (available here today) utilized more than 360 feedback items from Developer Community. We are currently working hard to build the next version of Visual Studio and just released 17.9 Preview 1, where we are actively looking for feedback. Below dives deeper into what community suggestions made it into the latest releases of Visual Studio, how you can start using these new features, and where to give feedback.

If you haven’t given feedback before, we invite you to join the conversation on our Microsoft Developer Community where you can vote, comment, and engage directly with Microsoft engineers and product managers. You can report problems you may be facing and suggest new ideas that you want to see come to life. We’re immensely grateful for the time you’ve invested in providing feedback and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts because your feedback is pivotal in making Visual Studio the best tool it can be. That said, we’re excited to showcase the latest features that emerged from your feedback, highlighting the tremendous impact of your suggestions.

Community Suggestions for 17.8

Create a Pull Request (🙏Community Suggestion – 293 votes)

You can now create a Pull Request, completing the entire inner workflow, in Visual Studio. Enter the New Pull Request window by clicking the link in the notification banner in Git Changes after pushing, or from the top-level menu via Git > GitHub/Azure DevOps > New Pull Request.

Case Preserving Find and Replace (🙏Community Suggestion – 76 votes)

When you do a Replace, you can now preserve the original casing of each match in your code. Note that to get Pascal case and Camel case, your Replace string must also be in Pascal case or Camel case.

Toggle case preservation in the Replace window with ‘Alt+V’ or by clicking on the ‘Preserve case’ option.

• Quick Replace (Ctrl+H)
• Replace in Files (Ctrl+Shift+H)

C++ #include Cleanup (🙏Community Suggestion – 51 votes)

You can now sort and clean up your #include directives automatically. Unused #include directives will be dimmed in the editor. You can hover over a dimmed include and use the lightbulb menu to either remove that include or all unused includes. There is now also the option to add #include directives for entities which are currently indirectly included via other headers.

Multi-Repo limit increase (🙏Community Suggestion – 8 votes)

We heard that many of you needed the number of active repositories to be more than 10. You can now work with up to 25 repositories at once in your solution.

Summary Diff & improvements (🙏Community Suggestion – 7 votes)

Leverage the new summary difference view to focus on the changes in your code. Enabled in every comparison view, the new summary difference view allows you to toggle the context lines to do file comparison faster. We’ve also implemented the Summary view in the diff and compare views. This new option allows you to see only the changes in the file with a few lines of context, making reviewing your changes in a commit or the comparison between two files much more efficient.

Show Size and Alignment of C++ Types (🙏Community Suggestion – 6 votes)

You can now visualize the size and alignment of your C++ data types, such as classes, structs, unions, base types, or enums, without compiling your code. To check the size and alignment, hover over the identifier and a Quick Info tooltip will display the information.

Community Suggestions for 17.9 Preview 1

Switch between single and multiple rows in the document well (🙏Community Suggestion – 253 votes)

You can now quickly switch between single and multiple tab rows in Visual Studio’s document well by scrolling the mouse wheel up or down. The first time you open more tabs in Visual Studio than can fit in a single row in the document well, you’ll see a tip letting you know of this new feature.

Scrolling down on the mouse wheel while hovering over the tabs in the document will shift your view to show multiple tab rows. Conversely, scrolling up on the mouse wheel will collapse the view down to a single tab row.

Ability to load extensions using config files (🙏Community Suggestion – 140 votes)

Many users enhance their Visual Studio experience by relying on custom extensions to provide very targeted specific, and often contextual functionality. However, it was sometimes difficult to standardize extension functionality across teams, projects, installations, etc. We’re happy to announce that now, you can leverage your vsconfig files and include extension information in there, alongside the component information. Since vsconfig files are easy to pass around and share with others, it’ll be easy to now share information about which extensions to load.

When the Visual Studio installer reads a vsconfig file, it will detect if any extensions are specified, and if so, it will load them within Visual Studio in a machine wide context, available for all users to use. You can use the installer and import a config file into an existing installation, or you can use it to initialize a new installation. You can programmatically pass in a vsconfig file, either directly or by using winget configure. You can add a vsconfig file to your repo or solution, and when Visual Studio loads the solution it’ll process the config file. You can create a layout using a vsconfig file and now you can instruct clients that install from that layout to respect the config file.

Memory Layout for C++ Classes, Structs, and Unions (🙏Community Suggestion – 90 votes)

This feature allows you to visualize the memory layout of classes or structs. It shows you how the data members are arranged in memory, including their padding, offsets, and sizes. To access this feature, hover your cursor over the name of a class or struct in your code editor. A Quick Info tooltip will appear with a “Memory Layout” link. Click on the link to open a new window with the memory layout diagram. In the diagram, you can hover over each data member to see its offset and size in bytes.

Improved IntelliSense Support for Unreal Engine (🙏Community Suggestion – 6 votes)

Unreal Engine uses its own reflection mechanism to connect its C++ and Blueprints worlds. This is achieved through custom preprocessing of C++ sources with Unreal Header Tool (UHT) and injection through regular C++ preprocessor. In Visual Studio 2022 version 17.9 Preview 1, we have improved the handling of Unreal Engine IntelliSense by ensuring consistency and accuracy. IntelliSense in Visual Studio will now refresh more readily for UHT generated files, reducing the likelihood of displaying unwarranted errors.

Instrumentation “Start with collection pause” option (🙏Community Suggestion – 1 vote)

The Instrumentation tool now has a “start-pause” option for profiling applications. This lets you start the app under the profiler’s control without immediately collecting data. You can resume data collection later when needed by hitting the record button. This is useful, especially in gaming, where you can get into the game before data collection starts. The feature is compatible with both native and managed projects.

More Developer Community Suggestions

17.8

• Breakpoint Highlight – C# – Developer Community (25 votes)
• Make (editing) Typing/Scrolling more responsive – Developer Community (24 votes)
• Compare multiple files with previous version – Developer Community (8 votes)
• Git differences: show only differences and omit lines that weren’t changed – Developer Community (7 votes)
• Disable automatic multi-branch-history toggling of current/initial Git branch on Git Repository dialog – Developer Community (4 votes)

17.9 Preview 1

• Linter/IntelliSense C/C++ generates E1282 on an simple concatinations L”str1″ “str2” “str3” … – Developer Community (1 vote)

New Features we need your help with!

We are actively working on these features and would love some additional input from you on what you expect from these features, your workflows, your needs and nice to haves to see if we can improve our current design. Please leave feedback on Developer Community for these features linked below.

Create a Pull Request, 🙏Community Suggestion

Avoid switching context to the browser by creating your GitHub or Azure DevOps Pull Request directly in Visual Studio. There’s support for finding reviewers, editing your description, previewing in Markdown, and leveraging the new summary difference view to focus only on your changes.

AI Generated Commit Messages, 🙏Community Suggestion

Get a detailed summary of the changes in your Git commit messages with the help of GitHub Copilot. This new feature helps you better track the work completed in your Git History and helps your teammates review your work at pull request. Simply generate, insert, and edit your message as needed from the Git Changes window.

We are Listening!

We want to re-emphasize just how much we value your insights and suggestions. Our commitment to integrating your feedback is unwavering, and we’re eager to hear more. We can’t address every suggestion from the community, but your ideas spark innovation. They shape the enhancements and improvements we make to Visual Studio. So, keep them coming! Share your thoughts, join the dialogue, vote on features, and fixes you want most and share them with others, so we know how important it is that your ideas get built. Together, we’re co-creating the future of Visual Studio, one line of code at a time.

You can share feedback with us via Developer Community: report any bugs or issues via report a problem and share your suggestions for new features or improvements to existing ones.

Stay connected with the Visual Studio team by following us on YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitch and on Microsoft Learn.

Thanks for giving us your feedback and Happy Coding!

Jason Chlus Program Manager, Visual Studio

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