News

Visual Studio Team Seeks Help with Help (Menu, That Is)

• By David Ramel
• 09/29/2021

Microsoft's Visual Studio dev team is seeking help to revamp the IDE's help menu.

The team is experimenting with different versions of the "age old" help menu while seeking developer feedback on the options. The goal is to connect users to resources to better unlock Visual Studio, including:

• Documentation
• Getting started material
• Social media
• Developer Community
• Subscription information

Thus, as the above graphic depicting before and after screenshots of the help menu in Visual Studio 2019 v16.11 shows, the first experiment worked up by the dev team expands the number of items from 13 to 17. New items include:

• Get Started
• Tips and Tricks
• Keyboard Shortcut Reference
• Explore Feature Requests
• Join Us on Social Media
• Release Notes
• Roadmap
• My Subscription

Some menu items were just tweaked, like "Online Privacy Statement" becoming just "Privacy" and "Register Product" becoming "Register Visual Studio." Others were removed completely, like "Keyboard Accessibility" and "Xamarin."

While the changes may seem minor at first glance, the dev team's announcement shows how much thought goes into each one. Take, for example, the last item in the first list presented above: subscription information under the "My Subscription" help menu item.

"Most users who've purchased Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise (or have had it purchased by their organization) have a Visual Studio subscription," explained Jason Chlus, program manager, in a blog post. "If you have a Visual Studio subscription you may not know about the broad collection of additional benefits that are included! This menu item will give you access to:

• The subscriber portal to start using all of the subscription benefits included for free with your subscription. Offers change based on your subscription type, but here are a couple examples of what you might be missing out on:
  • Up to $150 in monthly Azure credits included for free with your subscription. No credit card is required to activate these, and they refresh every month. From hosting a static website, publishing an ASP.NET site to Azure, to building a containers in Azure, there are unlimited ways to start using your Azure credits today.
  • Up to 6 months of Pluralsight courses where you can find hundreds of courses around C#, ASP.NET, Azure, Angular, React, and more.
  • Up to 4 technical support incidents that can be used to resolve break-fix issues in non-production environments.
• Product downloads
  • All previous versions of Visual Studio and access to a huge library of current and past Microsoft software for use in developing and testing your applications.
• Product Keys to assist with offline installs, and to unlock all the products you require.
• Subscription Documentation to assist with troubleshooting and help make sure you get the most out of your subscription.

Developers are notoriously picky about the exact setup of their IDEs, paying close attention to colors, icons, layouts and so on, so it was no surprise that they weighed in with their opinions in the comments section of the announcement.

One reader expressed reasoned concern about the size of the menu with the new additions, preferring that it be as small as possible to narrow the focus on the main topic: help.

Here is the reply by Chlus: "Due to this being our first experiment with the help menu we added lots of new items to see how users would like the new options. We will be looking to make adjustments in upcoming releases. Please leave specific feedback you have on the Developer Community ticket: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/We-want-to-make-Help-all-you-need-Help/1529022?from=email&space=8&entry=suggestion."