August 25th, 2021

It looks like you’re using Visual Studio. Would you like help?

Misty Hays
Misty Hays
Sr. Program Manager

We recently asked in an installer survey what you’d find valuable to see while you’re staring at the installer screen during updates/installations in Visual Studio 2022, and y’all said tips and tricks! 

Y’all also told us that you want to see tips in the IDE, too—in a Visual Studio start page! Receiving tips from a virtual assistant was the second-highest response. 📎👀

 

A GIF showing a carousel of three code/IDE Navigation tips (various display modes, bookmarks, and view code structure) tips shown in the Visual Studio installer

 

Let us show you the best tips and tricks

We launched a new feature in the installer in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 2 that shows tips and tricks during Visual Studio updates and installation. We’re testing to see if it’s helpful or not. Do you want to see the newest features as soon as they’re released? Do you want to see which tips the .NET team uses? Do you want to see popular tricks from the Visual Studio engineering teams? What about GitHub? Would you like to see tips from other devs who write code in your programming language?

In our user testing, a developer said they wanted to receive tips based on how they use Visual Studio, “It would be great if I could see what exactly is being installed…all of the features that I use more frequently…what feature this new update is going to impact…based on my own usage statistics. That would definitely be awesome.”

A comparison of 5 design mock-ups we used in user testing

We want the tips and tricks to be beneficial and awesome, and we want to give you what you want, so please tell us! 

  • How would you build this feature? 
  • How would it look?
  • Where would it be?  
  • What tips would you like to see? 
  • Pick your favorite design ✨here✨ in this 2-question survey! 

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please let us know in the comments. 

Category
Visual Studio
Topics
.NETAnnouncementAzureProductivityTips and TricksVisual Studio 2022VS

Author

Misty Hays
Misty Hays
Sr. Program Manager

Misty is a senior program manager on the Visual Studio Acquisition & Retention Team and is the host of Retro Tech on Microsoft's Ch9. She blogs about Visual Studio and retro Microsoft tech.

60 comments

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

Newest
Newest Popular Oldest
  • Amro Osama

    Sorry if this is not directly related, but I can’t seem to find an answer.

    If I setup VS 2022 preview 4, would I be able to update it to the final release version later?

    Thanks!

  • Mo Abbas

    Hey Misty, thank you for the blog post, FYI the image is very blurry and it’s not clear, are you able to upload a high quality image please

  • Tibor Blazko · Edited

    sorry, you want someone to choose one of 5 blurry images which one is best? of course none of it
    why visual studio can’t have web/help page where tips and tricks are diplayed in readable form and who is interested will open it, not disturbing uninterested ones?
    this can save your time to develop something really usable, or, as I preffer, do make existing features more stable

    • Misty HaysMicrosoft employee Author

      Hey Tibor! If you don’t like tips/tricks, that’s okay and you can close them by clicking the collapse button in the top right corner. Thanks for taking time to read my blog post!

      • Tibor Blazko

        I never said I do not like it
        I just said you instead of fireworks presentation of something could be solved easy way, you could spend time with something really useful

  • Leo Cheung · Edited

    I like the tips and trick idea, many peoples think, (Hey, I am VS expert, had use 20 years since VS6, Don't treat me as student), but not all peoples always stay with VS and remember bleeding edge feature.
    Just like the What's New section since VS 2015, I really love that so I don't miss the update from Visual Studio Team.
    The tips on Android Studio or JetBrain PHP Storm always give me surprise...

    Read more
    • Misty HaysMicrosoft employee Author

      Thanks, Leo! Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like tips on!

  • Jiří Zídek

    I'd vote to invest into stability, instead of such no-use function. Almost year I do not see any squiggles in any large projects, they appear after few hours, if I do not touch the PC. Same for others in team. Showing errors is the very basic functionality of IDE! After your codeanalysers and suggestion helpers hurricane it simply does not work on large projects. Remove the bloat that block basic functionality please. Otherwise we switch...

    Read more
    • Misty HaysMicrosoft employee Author

      Hey Jiří! I'm sorry to hear that and you're right about errors being a basic functionality. Have you filed a ticket? There are two ways to do it and here's the link: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/report?space=8&entry=problem

      If you file a ticket, that makes sure we can track it and that you'll receive a follow-up; it won't get lost. Also, we can collect logs and troubleshoot the problem. Thanks for taking time to read my blog post!

      Read more
  • Sana Shanab · Edited

    Well Im trying to create sample of crud core razor and tried to use 2019 and 2022 preview but i ran to that entity frame core not all the components are available so store data into sql I was unable to do it because of these components some version five and some version one and it is hard to find those so yes i pulled my hair and yet i was un able to have...

    Read more
  • Eli Black

    Personally, I think this is great! 🙂

    My recommendation, though, would be to have the tips not automatically scroll. Instead, just show the first tip and let the user click to another tip if they're interested. I think that should make it so that veterans don't get too annoyed (having tips scroll by when you're trying to focus on something is annoying) but also give people a chance to learn something from the tips, if they...

    Read more
    • Misty HaysMicrosoft employee Author

      Hey Black Elijah!! I think I recognize you from DevComm, right? Thanks! Makes sense! I’ll keep that in mind if I get consistent feedback about it being distracting. I don’t like being distracted either, especially when I’m writing code so I get it!

  • SuperCoco

    I prefer the old non-modal Start Page with Developer News and more, and the old New Project dialog.

    • Misty HaysMicrosoft employee Author

      Hi Super! What do you like about the old Start page? I’d love to hear more! Stay tuned for the next blog post because I’ll talk about this!

  • Jefferson Motta

    Theme black with colorful icons like VS 2008 had would be greate! If you have distinct icons the brain (that prefer images than text – and is know in neuroscience!) works faster to work.

    But about IDE I feel that I would be greate add solutions in solutions.

    Best,

    #jefferson2020

    • Misty HaysMicrosoft employee Author

      Hey Jefferson! You’re right; I love studying neuroscience! It’s a hobby 🧠 ! Stay tuned for the next blog post because I’ll talk about some concepts related to this. Thanks!

  • Aashish Upadhyay

    Sir please ,we want visual studio for linux

Read next