News

Mads Asks What You Want for Visual Studio 2022

• By David Ramel
• 04/18/2022

Microsoft's Mads Kristensen -- Visual Studio developer and extensions author extraordinaire -- is asking his 30,000-plus Twitter followers what features they would like for Visual Studio 2022.

It's unknown if the query will result in built-in IDE functionality from the dev team, or more likely, if the extensions expert will whip up new features to be provided by additions to his dozens of popular tools in the Visual Studio Marketplace, where his top item has been downloaded by more than 1.2 million developers.

On April 18, he simply asked: "If you could add a new Visual Studio 2022 feature, what would it be?"

A few hours in, he already had plenty of suggestions, including:

• How about a NuGet "My Favorites" section, where I can see the stuff I put in often - maybe smart list where it automatically has the ones I use most often but also lets me pin my own favorites.
• A new UX for Fonts and Colors.

  

• I would like a Visual Studio debugger that can correctly set breakpoints on native, non-exported symbols, something that I could only get working with windbgx after wasting hours trying to make it work in Visual Studio.
• Let me manage TFS or from the visual studio. When I am working on feature/bug i can commit and push to TFS from within the studio but I have to leave to create the PR, monitor its progress etc. Let me doing this from VS please
• Code completion and syntax highlighting for COM IDL, 25 years and still not available.
• making edit-and-continue usable for Windows C++ apps. 100% of the time either the recompilation hangs, or it goes on for a very long time (longer than it would take to stop, rebuild and relaunch), or it thinks on it for a long time then says "can't do EnC".
• Audio cues while in the editor. So folks can choose to hear a sound when they arrive on a line with a breakpoint, an error or something similar. If only I knew someone with the power to add features...
• Being able to choose the drive that VS installs to. VS installs a bunch of stuff on your OS drive, and you'll quickly run out of space if your drive is small and you have multiple VS installations.
• A way to search the shortcut key to see what commands it is tied to rather than only being able to search the commands.
• renaming namespaces across multiple files at a time as opposed to each file individually.
• A memory profiler for cross platform dev. The Xamarin profiler was really useful but sadly only available on enterprise and long since dead.
• Bring back LinqToSql. And I am being serious. I know it had issues but it was so easy to work with for quick business applications.
• Basic syntax highlighting for T4.
• Started learning Rust lately. Would love to have full support in VS instead of having to use rust-analyzer in VS Code.
• Integrated CodeFlow for pull request code reviews
• I think performance should be a top priority. This has improved in last release, but still… I am using a laptop with 40 Gb ram and pretty good intel CPU and still hangs/freezes when doing simple things, solution has loads of projects but still...😟
• Some extensions built-in. (many of them are in the Tweaks or Power Tool collections) Why? Because then I can ensure it won't be abandoned in the near future.
• More DevOps templates. It's still fairly easy to publish to Azure PaaS with VS, but trying to figure out how to write yaml is like trying to learn yet another arcane platform/language. CI/CD is vital especially when developing with VSCode. VS dropped MSI support so give us yaml.

Replies are still being posted as this is being written, so visit the tweet link above to weigh in with your own suggestions or vote on others. So far, a cursory examination shows the first two items in the list, asking for a NuGet "My Favorites" section and for the fonts/colors UX, are the top vote getters, with 29 and 26 upvotes respectively at the time of this writing.