Let’s Co-Create! Your Voice Matters 

Jason Chlus

August 10th, 202311 5

We want to celebrate the suggestions you’ve made and the time you have invested in giving feedback to help build Visual Studio. We’re thrilled to announce that Visual Studio 2022 17.7, which began with Preview 1 on May 16th, is now officially out of Preview and generally available! The journey from Preview to today has been shaped by the insights and feedback of our community. Whether you’ve been with us since the beginning or are just joining now, we want to thank you for the suggestions you’ve made in this new release. 

Feedback from developers like you influences every release of Visual Studio. We want you at the heart of our product development process so we can quickly remove pain points and make you more productive. 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 also 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. With that being said we’re excited to dive into the latest set of features that emerged from your feedback, highlighting the tremendous impact of your suggestions. 

Community Suggestions for 17.7: 

Here are some of the features you’ve been talking about, and our responses to them. We’re all ears and focused on next steps for the upcoming release: 

Comparing Files (🙏community suggestion – 543 votes) 

You no longer need to leave Visual Studio and rely on other tools to compare files. Now you can easily compare any file in Solution Explorer with other files by either: 

  • Right-clicking on a single file, selecting “Compare With…” from the context menu which will bring up File Explorer. Navigating to any file on disk and selecting it for comparison. 
  • Multi-selecting two files by holding down the Ctrl button then right-clicking and selecting “Compare Selected” from the context menu. 
Copy and Trim Indentation (🙏community suggestion – 86 votes) 

If you have ever copied code from Visual Studio to another application (Outlook, Teams, Slack, etc) and found that your code indentation has not been copied correctly, you will find that this new capability fixes that for you. Visual Studio now automatically fixes indentation for you when you copy code from Visual Studio and paste it in another application. 

Multi-branch Git Graph (🙏community suggestion – 149 votes) 

Collaborating across different git branches gets tricky without the ability to understand the relationship between these branches. Visualizing multiple branches doesn’t only make it easy to compare between branches, but it also empowers you to perform cross branch operations like cherry picking a commit for example. Now you can quickly spot any missing commits you would like to cherry pick without having to navigate away from your current branch.  

Auto-decompilation for External .NET Code (🙏community suggestion – 29 votes) 

Visual Studio’s External Source Debugging is now more powerful and effortless with auto-decompilation for external .NET code. When you step into external code, the debugger will now display the point of execution. This feature is particularly useful when analyzing call stacks, as you can double-click any stack frame and the debugger will navigate directly to the code. You can debug the decompiled code and set breakpoints easily. 

All the decompiled code is also shown under the External Sources node in Solution Explorer when in debug session, making it easy to browse through the external files if needed. If you wish to disable the automatic decompilation of external code, simply clear the “Automatically decompile to source when needed (managed only)” option under Tools > Options > Debugging. 

C++ Build Insights (🙏community suggestion – 141 votes) 

Build Insights provides you with valuable information needed when optimizing your C++ build times. Start your Build Insights .etl trace capture with a click of a button for your solution or projects. In Visual Studio 17.7, you can now see Included Files and Include Tree view. For advanced profiling, click the “Open in WPA” button to see the trace in Windows Performance Analyzer. After compilation, Build Insights will create a diagnostic report that allows you to see expensive includes and navigate directly to header files.  

Ability for Standard Users to Update and Modify Visual Studio (🙏community suggestion – 97 votes) 

When organizations restrict user permissions, it compromises their ability to keep Visual Studio updated and secure. The Visual Studio installer requires administrator permissions to use, but when users don’t have this level of access, they are prevented from updating Visual Studio and acquiring the latest security fixes and features.  

We’re happy to announce that starting with the 17.7 installer, standard users with minimized permissions can now update and modify Visual Studio! The initial bootstrapping and policy configuration to enable this must still be done by an administrator, but after that, any installer functionality can be initiated and executed by a non-administrator user. 

More Developer Community Suggestions:  

Experience the Innovation Together! 

Visual Studio 17.7 is here, packed with features inspired by developers like you. Don’t wait to see the changes you’ve helped shape; experience them now. 

We’re 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 our innovation. They shape the enhancements and improvements we make to Visual Studio. So, keep them coming! Share your thoughts, join the dialogue, vote on the 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. 

Your feedback is critical to help us make Visual Studio the best tool it can be! 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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11 comments

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  • Heinrich Moser 5

    I’d like share both praise and criticism:

    1. Thank you! I wish other teams at Microsoft (cough Office cough) had such an open and direct communication channel between the developers using the product and the developers developing the product.

    2. Some of the items you listed under “More Developer Community Suggestions” are bug reports. Fixing bugs should not be something that requires community voting.

    • anonymous 0

      this comment has been deleted.

    • David Lowndes 0

      Ditto to the wish for more teams at MS to have such a good open feedback channel – it’s Windows development I’m thinking of here, and no, Feedback Hub isn’t that channel.

  • hitesh davey 7

    VS is the best IDE I have ever used in the last two decades. I can’t imagine a day without it. “BUT…”

    MS VS TEAM…
    -Your Voice Matters!
    -We’re Listening!
    -Your feedback is critical to help us make Visual Studio the best tool it can be!
    -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.

    These terminologies look good for reading but practically MS VS team is least bother to listen to the majority of the developers’ pain points. For Example…
    Ever since VS2019 was released, the majority of the VS users complained about the so-called modern NEW project dialog but VS team is just ignorant. Classic NEW project dialog was highly productive and the most complete ever (none has asked to add a new feature but VS team has revamped it and messed it up).

    I wonder why VS team is not providing a simple option for the user to switch to the classic NEW project dialog over the modern dialog.? Why is so hard to provide such an option? Why force users to use an unproductive Modern new dialog which has flaws in UX/UI?

    VS Team: Experience the Innovation Together
    Apart from Winforms designer where is the pixel-perfect WYSIWYG designer for ASP.NET core, BLAZOR, MAUI, and MOBILE APP?
    Where is the innovation? VS becoming more like a (VS CODE) scripting editor than a “Visual” studio.

  • Eugene Ivanoff 0

    When triple quotes will work in Razor Editor?

  • Daniel Smith 7

    Great set of welcome additions.

    However, I’d be interested to know how community suggestions are prioritised. Most of these items have way lower votes than the “Project Rename – Rename Folder” issue (#408794) which currently has 258 votes and is now coming up for its half decade (!) anniversary. The suggestion has actually made its way through 3 different feedback systems over the years (it was originally requested back when Connect was the main feedback site, then on User Voice, and finally on Developer Community) so it’s actually even older than it looks. It’s a real pain point, and seems like something that should be fairly trivial to address. It’s like it’s been forgotten about because it’s so old.

    • Kevin Trace 1

      I completely agree. This has always been such a pain. Here is the link to that item https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Project-Rename—Rename-Folder/408794

      I tried to up vote it but I am getting “Unexpected error. Sorry, we couldn’t send your vote. Please retry now or sign out, sign in, and try again”. Anyone else having this issue? Update: I used a different Microsoft account and it allowed me to vote.

  • Andreas Saurwein 2

    There are lots of “improvements” that nobody asks for, instead of fixing bugs that are blatant and annoying since, almost ever it seems.
    How the VS team prioritizes is really a mystery.
    Now and then something really useful creeps in but it feels almost accidentally.
    Solution and project management needs a serious revamp, it works as of now just for small devs. Enterprise devs with dozens if projects have to use other means.

  • Vasilios Magriplis 2

    A casual look through things like the C++/MSVC section in DevCom shows dozens and dozens of compiler bugs and quirks reported to Microsoft that get dumped into the “Under consideration” category (including bugs regarding quite fundamental development aspects, like debugging), which means they might never even get fixed, and that’s not even accounting for all the old issues awaiting resolution, some of which date back years. Even for bugs that get fixed, it seems to take forever and a day for the fixes to actually ship (I had one particularly annoying internal compiler error I reported, and the fix was finally released six months later).

    The sentiment of this blog post is nice, but I think reality doesn’t quite comport with it.

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