Visual Studio 2017 New Feature
1 - Visual Studio 2017 Installer
Visual Studio 2017 comes with a brand new, revamped installer. I have never been a fan of the previous Visual Studio installers. It literally took forever to install Visual Studio. It was, in my opinion, a very painful experience and I dreaded every time I had to install a new version of Visual Studio. Now, the process is far less painful.
The new installer for Visual Studio 2017 has the following features:
- Installs more quickly with less system impact.
- Uninstalls cleanly.
- Reduces the footprint of Visual Studio.
- Makes it easier for you to select and install just the features you need.
2 - A New Visual Studio Start Page
The new Visual Studio 2017 Start Page has new Open and Create facilities, including:
- Updated badge on newly added items in the News Feed.
- Dismissible "Get Started" section.
- The Visual Studio 2017 Start Page Most Recent Used items (MRU) shows repos that you have cloned on other machines so that you can easily clone them on your current machine.
- Create new projects directly from the Start Page with searchable templates and a list of recently used templates.
- Refined visual design to address feedback about truncated elements on smaller screens and utilization of empty space.
3 - New Extensibility Features
The new Visual Studio 2017 installer gives you greater control over the tools that are installed. Users will be warned when attempting to install an extension that was not built using the new VSIX format.
4 - Live Unit Testing
Live Unit Testing visualizes unit test results and code coverage live on the editor, as you are coding. It works with C# and VB projects and supports three test frameworks: MS Test, xUnit, and NUnit. Currently, Live Unit Testing is only present in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio 2017.
5 - Run to Click Debugging
You can simply click the icon next to a line of code whilst debugging to run to that line. You no longer have to set temporary breakpoints or perform several steps to execute your code and stop on the line you want.
6 - The New Visual Studio 2017 Exception Helper
- You can use the new Exception Helper in Visual Studio 2017 to view exception information in a compact, non-modal dialog with instant access to inner exceptions.
- Quickly see what was null inside the Exception Helper when diagnosing a NullReferenceException.
- You can exclude breaking on exception types thrown from specific modules.
7 - Language Extensions
C#
- Task-like return types for async methods.
- Value tuples that introduce language support for using tuples to temporarily group a set of typed values.
- Nested local functions that support declaration of functions in a block scope.
- Pattern matching extensions.
- Ref returns that enable functions to return values by reference.
Visual Basic
- Value tuples; for example: Dim point As (x As Integer, y As Integer) = GetOffset().
- ByRef return consumption supports consumption of functions and properties from libraries that have ByRef returns.
- Binary literals and digit group separators allow native representation of binary numbers.