The latest and updated Visual Studio 2017 is here and it is the most powerful Windows application development platform ever. As Visual Studio team mentions on its blogs, Visual Studio 2017 brings unparalleled productivity improvements, a streamlined acquisition experience, and enhanced debugging tools for Universal Windows Platform developers.
Features of Visual Studio 2017
The latest Visual Studio focuses on enhancing the efficiency of basic tasks developers do every day. It is now very lightweight software and comes with a modular installer. It is faster than ever before and is more responsive IDE from start-up to shut down. As the team mentions, the new Visual Studio is three times faster for a cold start and two to three times faster for solution loading. For example, the first launch startup times have improved from 206 seconds in VS 2015 to 64.2 seconds in VS 2017. Developers will also see a new way to view, edit and debug any code without projects and solutions in Visual Studio 2017.
The Visual Studio team mentions in the blog,
“The Universal Windows Platform development workload gives you the right tools to be productive in authoring, debugging and publishing UWP apps. If something is missing, you will be able to add it later using the Visual Studio Installer.”
Visual Studio 2017 also has several other features that will boost productivity. VS 2017 has improvements in code navigation, IntelliSense, refactoring, code fixes and debugging. These new improvements will save developer’s time and effort on everyday tasks irrespective of language or platform.
- IntelliSense: With this new feature to VS 2017, developers can now quickly go through authoring the XAML using x:Bind and namespace completion.
- Code refactoring: Visual Studio 2017 has a number of refactorings and fixes that will help developers to maintain a readable code base. This will further accelerate their development workflows. For example, developers can de-clutter their XAML using the “Remove Unnecessary Namespaces” quick fix and retain only those they need. In case they remove a namespace that they might need later, the “add missing namespace” quick fix helps them add it back.
- Navigation: Visual Studio 2017 comes with ‘Navigate To’ feature that has better filtering and preview. Developers will find enhanced ‘Find All Reference’ by adding color, grouping and a peek preview in the ‘Find All References’ window.
- Run to Click: This feature will make developers life easy. ‘Run to Click’ executes a program until it reaches the targeted line of code and breaks in debug mode. This way, developers don’t need to constantly add, hit and remove temporary breakpoints. All these actions are combined together into ‘Run to Click’ feature.
Visual Studio 2017 features don’t end here. There are several other features added to the new VS 2017, such as Streamlined Azure Development and Five-star UWP app development. You can read and know more about these features on the latest Windows blogs.