A central theme across Visual Studio releases is ‘get to code’ quickly. Over the years, we’ve tried many approaches to accelerate start up, project selection or creation, and restoration of previous state. In Visual Studio 2019 we created the modal ‘start window’ experience that optimized for getting to the primary action most developers take when starting the shell. Since that release, there’s been mixed feedback. Much of the critical feedback revolved around the modality interruption when switching between solutions. That has led us to reconsider other options for “get to code.”
With your feedback in mind, we started experimenting with a new Welcome Experience. We’re only just starting our initial investigations in this area, and we know there’s a lot of work we need to do here to ensure a great experience. Read on for more information on what we’re thinking and download Visual Studio 17.6 Preview 2 today to give it a try and share your feedback:
Once you update to Visual Studio 17.6 Preview 2, you’ll get a sneak peek at some of our first attempts at improving the experience on launch of Visual Studio, informed by the previous start page versions, while leveraging the performance and UX improvements that were made for the start window. You’ll encounter an in-IDE Welcome tab instead of the modal Start Window, allowing you to jump right into the shell.
The Welcome page presents all the options you’re used to accessing from the Start Window as a tabbed document window in the IDE itself. These include:
- Your most recently used project list
- A search box for recent projects
- Quick links for creating a new project, opening an existing project, opening a folder, and cloning a repository
You’ll also find a new tile linking to the “What’s New” page, which shows information on some of the new features shipped in Visual Studio. If you’d like to free up some space on the Welcome tab, you can close the What’s New tile. This is a first step toward bringing additional customization to the page. Be sure to let us know what else would be useful to you for customizing your Welcome experience.
Let us know what you think!
Give the new Welcome page a try and let us know how it works for you. Let us know if there are any tiles or customizations you’d like added, or whether there’s anything we can improve about the already existing experience. We’ve created an item in Developer Community to serve as a hub for discussing the early work around this experience. Please join in the conversation there!
If you’re interested in seeing Developer News in the Welcome page, please upvote this item. If you have any other feedback, please feel free to share in Developer Community!
Edit May 30 2023:
Thanks everyone for your feedback! We’ve iterated based on your input and we’ve adjusted the design as well as the Most Recently Used (MRU) capability. Take a look at this blog post for more details.
I was actually a fan of the smaller start window. Is it possible to bring that back?
Speaking of "getting to code quickly", something happened in VS 2022 such that if I just want to make a new text file, I get two massive slowdowns. First I get a slowdown while it "initializes templates" and I see lots of network activity during this time. I just want to create a blank text file. This used to be nearly instantaneous in older versions of VS and was lightning fast (even on a 20 year old machine!) in VC6. Now because of the online template gallery it takes forever just to pick the "new text...
VS does a LOT of Internet communication, and for me I’ve discovered it’s the bulk of why it can feel slow sometimes. I don’t know all of what it does over the Internet, but I know that these days Microsoft does a boat-load of telemetry in all of their products, and for some of their products, it tracks each button click on menus and right-clicks.
Hello, Microsft Visual Studio Developer Team, could you create a solution dashboard with metrics and more… XD
Thanks, it's a good move compared to the previous modal, which was a disruption if you wanted to close the solution and minimize VS, because you had to close the modal before you could minimize.
The Welcome line is a waste of space since the recent list is more important than this and could make use of the vertical space. If the quick actions were all you were displaying, then sure, the Welcome line wouldn't be a big deal. You already have the tab named Welcome.
Recents:
You could also list them side-by-side/2-columns if there's enough width, but if you don't...