News

As New Visual Studio Extension Manager Previews, Mads K Floats New Tool Ideas

Just as a new extension manager for Visual Studio 2022 was announced in preview, Microsoft's Mads Kristensen, a principal program manager for the IDE and extension author extraordinaire, floated some new ideas for new tools and functionality.

The new extension manager, which was announced with the just-released Visual Studio 2022 17.9, sports a new UI and provides a new way to manage extensions.

Specifically, the new design maximizes space to show pertinent content when searching for extensions. Now, a large window shows the detailed description for a selected extension.

The Old Look
[Click on image for larger view.] The Old Look (source: Ramel).
The New Look
[Click on image for larger view.] The New Look (source: Ramel).

The new design also introduces search filters to help narrow down the list of extensions. For example, as shown in the screenshot below, devs can filter by category (Controls, Templates, Tools) and subcategory (Coding, Data, Documentation and more).

New Extension Manager Filtering in Animated Action
[Click on image for larger, animated GIF view.] New Extension Manager Filtering in Animated Action (source: Microsoft).

As the new Extension Manager is a preview feature, it must be enabled in the IDE's settings by clicking on Tools > Manage Preview Features and checking the box for Extension Manager UI Refresh (requires restart).

Meanwhile, around the time the new extension manager was being announced, Kristensen, who has authored more than 100 Visual Studio extensions, took to social media to float some new ideas for new tools and functionality.

Here are some of the ideas he shared recently:

  • Displaying return values of functions/methods when debugging in Visual Studio would be helpful. If you agree, vote here (During Debug Display Function Return Value):
  • What do you feel about this proposal for a tweak to the C# quote completion feature in Visual Studio? That proposal is for his "Better Quotes" tool whose description reads: "Fixes the issue where typing a quote character before or after a word, causes auto-insertion of a second quote character in C#. This is a common nuisance when typing in Visual Studio...."
  • Is this a good idea? If you are curious, try it out yourself. That link points to his EmojiSense tools, whose description reads: "IntelliSense for emojis in code comments and string for all languages."

Functionality provided by Kristensen's extensions often gets natively baked in to the Visual Studio IDE, so it's possible that some of these ideas could be implemented in the future. In the meantime, he has continually been posting about new tools he has created (or found), with recent posts including:

As Visual Studio 2022 17.10 is now in the works (see "Copilot Chat Highlights Visual Studio 2022 17.10 Preview 1"), stay tuned to see if any of these ideas are realized in that release -- and vote for features you like.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

  • Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

    We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?

  • TypeScript 5.8 Beta Speeds Program Loads, Updates

    "TypeScript 5.8 introduces a number of optimizations that can both improve the time to build up a program, and also to update a program based on a file change in either --watch mode or editor scenarios."

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube