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GitHub Strengthens Visual Studio Ties

As expected following its recent purchase of GitHub, Microsoft's flagship Visual Studio IDE is seeing stronger integrations with the development platform and open source code repository.

Microsoft is acquiring GitHub in a deal announced last month, though the company promised to maintain its open source independence.

That independence doesn't preclude closer ties with Microsoft dev tooling, however, and that's exactly what's being provided in the updated GitHub Extension for Visual Studio, a tool described as "the easiest way to connect your GitHub repositories in Visual Studio," and which is parked on GitHub.

The updated tool is part of the GitHub Editor Tools team's efforts "to bring parts of the GitHub experience to your development environment." Along with GitHub for Visual Studio, it has created GitHub for Unity and GitHub for Atom.

The new GitHub for Visual Studio 2.5.4 edition features a couple of major improvements, including improved navigation between GitHub.com and Visual Studio.

"Something we're particularly excited about exploring is how and why users navigate between GitHub.com and Visual Studio," the team announced in a blog post last week (July 24). "We've started explore the functionality of what is possible with things like opening links that have been copied to the clipboard (Code context > GitHub > Open from clipboard) and copying links from Visual Studio to your clipboard (Code context > GitHub > Copy link to clipboard)."

The other main improvement affects pull requests, with one part of that being the use of the new Octokit.NET library that uses the GraphQL API.

"Lists that used to take minutes to load are now loading in a matter of seconds within our extension," said GitHub's Sarah Guthals in the post. "Additionally, by using GraphQL for our pull request models, we will be able to use GitHub GraphQL APIs as they become available, keeping our extension up to date."

The team personally thanked several community volunteers who brought up the issues and helped create the solutions.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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