Visual Studio *

Great Visual Studio extensions share a few key features that sets them apart from the rest. They look and feel well crafted, are performant and reliable, do what they advertise to perfection, and blend in naturally among Visual Studio’s own features.

To make it easier to write great extensions, we’ve worked with the extensibility community to come up with a simple checklist to follow. There’s even a GitHub issue template you can use so you remember to go through the checklist.

Roslyn, the .NET compiler platform, helps you catch bugs even before you run your code. One example is Roslyn’s spellcheck analyzer that is built into Visual Studio. Let’s say you are creating a static method and misspelled the word static as statc. You will be able to see this spelling error before you run your code because Roslyn can produce warnings in your code as you type even before you’ve finished the line. In other words, you don’t have to build your code to find out that you made a mistake.



Roslyn analyzers can also surface an automatic code fix through the Visual Studio light bulb icon that allows you to fix your code immediately.

Using VS Code Remote and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) gives you a fully featured Linux development environment on a Windows laptop or desktop. Let’s look at how using these tools will completely change how you develop with Linux tools in Windows.

We are pleased to announce that the June 2019 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. If you already have the Python extension installed, you can also get the latest update by restarting Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.

In this release we made improvements that are listed in our changelog, closing a total of 70 issues including a plot viewer with the Python Interactive window, parallel tests with pytest, and indentation of run selection in the terminal.

Every development environment has a tool called «Output». There is no need to describe what it does, since all developers without exception use it in their work on a daily basis. It is simple and conservative. 

It has remained essentially unchanged for decades, and to this day looks something like this:


Text, text, and more text. Lots of text...

Even in this tiny example the line containing the error is not immediately apparent. Finding it takes time and effort. Simply because one has to read through the text and search for the words «error», «exception» or «warning». The programmer has to search, and the client has to pay for the time spent searching.

Many of our articles are focused on anything, but not the PVS-Studio tool itself. Whereas we do a lot to make its usage convenient for developers. Nevertheless, our efforts are often concealed behind the scenes. I decided to remedy this situation and tell you about the PVS-Studio plugin for Visual Studio. If you use Visual Studio, this article is for you.

Whether you are new or have been using Visual Studio for years, there are a bunch of tips and tricks that can make you more productive. We’ve been sharing tips on Twitter using the hashtag #vstip for a while, and this is a collection of the best ones so far.

Debugger

Hitting F10 to build, run, and attach debugger instead of F5 will automatically break on the first time your own code is being executed. No breakpoints needed.



Supported from Visual Studio 2005

Reattach to process (Shift+Alt+P) is extremely helpful when you have to attach to the same process again and again.



Supported from Visual Studio 2017 v15.8

A blue dot in the margin indicates a switch of threads while stepping through debugging.



Supported from Visual Studio 2013

During code analysis, PVS-Studio analyzes the data flow and operates variable values. Values are taken from constants or derived from conditional expressions. We call them virtual values. Recently, we have refined them in order to work with multi-character constants and this has become the reason to create a new diagnostic rule.

Introduction

Multi-character-literals are implementation-defined, so different compilers can encode them in different ways. For example, GCC and Clang set a value, based on the order of the symbols in the literal, while MSVC moves them depending on the symbol's type (regular or escape).

We’re excited to announce the preview availability of the new Azure IoT Edge Tools Extension (Preview) for Visual Studio 2019. The extension provides a rich set of functionalities to support development of IoT Edge solutions with Visual Studio 2019:

Since I’ve been working with the community on porting desktop applications from .NET Framework to .NET Core, I’ve noticed that there are two camps of folks: some want a very simple and short list of instructions to get their apps ported to .NET Core while others prefer a more principled approach with more background information. Instead of writing up a “Swiss Army knife”-document, we are going to publish two blog posts, one for each camp:

• This post is the simple case. It’s focused on simple instructions and smaller applications and is the easiest way to move your app to .NET Core.
• We will publish another post for more complicated cases. This post will focus more on non-trivial applications, such WPF application with dependencies on WCF and third-party UI packages.

If you prefer watching videos instead of reading, here is the video where I do everything that is described below.

It's not a secret that Microsoft has been working on the 8-th version of C# language for quite a while. The new language version (C# 8.0) is already available in the recent release of Visual Studio 2019, but it's still in beta. This new version is going to have a few features implemented in a somewhat non-obvious, or rather unexpected, way. Nullable Reference types are one of them. This feature is announced as a means to fight Null Reference Exceptions (NRE).

Support of Visual Studio 2019 in PVS-Studio affected a number of components: the plugin itself, the command-line analyzer, the cores of the C++ and C# analyzers, and a few utilities. In this article, I will briefly explain what problems we encountered when implementing support of the IDE and how we addressed them.

Ever since we announced Template IntelliSense, you all have given us great suggestions. One very popular suggestion was to have the Template Bar auto-populate candidates based on instantiations in your code. In Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1 Preview 2, we’ve added this functionality via an “Add All Existing Instantiations” option in the Template Bar dropdown menu. The following examples are from the SuperTux codebase. 

Here at Visual Studio App Center, we try to incorporate customer obsession in our day to day. Earlier this year we started an effort for widespread customer outreach to understand our users and guide product prioritization. The effort helped us gain a lot of insight and helped our prioritization last quarter. However, as we continue to grow, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to reach out to as many customers as we would like.

To continue to engage with as many customers are possible, we created a GitHub repo specifically for this purpose. We’ve been using the repo to track monthly iterations from the team, feature requests, and community interest for certain features. We are making changes to align our priorities for the upcoming quarters based on what our customers are requesting.

I wanted to highlight some of the changes we’ve made to the Distribution service based off what we learned from customer outreach and feedback. All of these changes are available now:

• Distributing releases to multiple destinations
• Distribution releases to individual testers
• Turning off email notification for releases
• Disabling a release
• Make releases sortable

We are pleased to announce that the April 2019 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available. You can download the Python extension from the Marketplace, or install it directly from the extension gallery in Visual Studio Code. You can learn more about Python support in Visual Studio Code in the documentation.

In this release we made a series of improvements that are listed in our changelog, closing a total of 84 issues including:

• Variable Explorer and Data Viewer
• Enhancements to debug configuration
• Additional improvements to the Python Language Server

Keep on reading to learn more!  

Visual Studio’s project templates enable you, the developer, to create multiple similar projects more efficiently by defining a common set of starter files. The project templates can be fully customized to meet the needs of a development team, or a group, and can be published to the Visual Studio Marketplace for others to download and use too! Once published, developers can install and access the template through Visual Studio’s New Project Dialog.

The newly designed New Project Dialog for Visual Studio 2019 was built to help developers get to their code faster. Using a search and filter focused experience, we are aiming to provide better discoverability for specific templates to start your application development

 

Some days ago we announced improved Razor tooling support in Visual Studio Code with the latest C# extension. This latest release includes improved Razor diagnostics and support for tag helpers and Blazor apps.

As application requirements grow more complex, so do our solutions. Keeping developers’ environments configured across our organizations grows equally complex. Developers need to install specific workloads and components in order to build a solution. Some organizations add these requirements to their README or CONTRIBUTING documents in their repositories. Some organizations might publish these requirements in documents for new hires or even just forward emails. Configuring your development environment often becomes a day-long chore. What’s really needed is a declarative authoring model that just configures Visual Studio like you need it.

In Visual Studio 2017 Update 15.9 we added the ability to export and import workload and component selection to a Visual Studio installation configuration file. Developers can import these files into new or existing installations. Checking these files into your source repos makes them easy to share. However, developers still need to import these to get the features they need.

Automatically install missing components

New in Visual Studio 2019: you can save these files as .vsconfig files in your solution root directory and when the solution (or solution directory) is opened, Visual Studio will automatically detect which components are missing and prompt you to install them.

Earlier this week, we released Visual Studio 2019 version 16.1 Preview 1 (see release notes). It’s the first preview of the first update to Visual Studio 2019. If you’re not already set up to get preview releases, then please do that now. The preview channel installs side-by-side with the release channel and they don’t interfere with each other. I highly recommend all extension authors install the preview.

Got the 16.1 preview installed now then? That’s great. Here are some features in it you might find interesting.

The Time Travel Debugging (TTD) preview in Visual Studio Enterprise 2019 provides the ability to record a Web app running on a Azure Virtual Machine (VM) and then accurately reconstruct and replay the execution path. TTD integrates with our Snapshot Debugger offering and allows you to rewind and replay each line of code however many times you want, helping you isolate and identify problems that might only occur in production environments.