Visual Studio 2019: First Look

Microsoft recently announced the release of Visual Studio 2019 Preview 1 at connect 2018 event. Visual Studio 2019 has been released with lots of great features. Let’s explore.

UI Changes
Initial thing you will notice that VS 2019 is really faster and they have the changed the start-up page. Start-up page is much faster and responsive and it’s more developer friendly. In the initial screen itself it will give option to Clone/Checkout code or Open the project etc. with simple screen to choose.

Below is the new editor window and it looks less clunky compared to older version and overall it really looks great. Below are some of the changes:

• Menu is more condensed and because of that code editor will get more space. Particularly they removed the window title row and making menu as the first row.
  
• The Ctrl + Q search field moved to the right of the menu and changed a bit in functionality. The new features include fuzzy search, faster results and “search online” feature:
  
• A Document Health / Code Cleanup light bulb has been added to the bottom-right corner.
  
• A Live Share button has been added.
  

Code Clean-up
Similar to what Re-sharper provides, The little light bulb at the bottom right corner collects all your issues in one place. Issues include error, warning and suggestions. Some suggestions are similar to what Re-sharper provides. For example, you can automatically apply the var keyword when possible. Or automatically sort and remove unnecessary using statements. And even that is Configurable.

Debugging Features
With new release, step actions like F10 and F11 are now 50% faster and now use can search in Local Window. 
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Project Dialog
One of the major UI change is the new project window. New project window is clean and simple and better user experience than before.

Intellicode
Intellicode is not currently part of Visual Studio 2019 but it’s available as an extension to install. This extension will add suggested auto-completion options to your Intellisense. The technology behind it is a machine learning AI that scans open-source projects on GitHub and learns the most common actions a programmer will do.

Live Share
Live Share was already available as an extension for VS2017, but it’s available out of the box in VS2019. The Live Share also includes several improvements that were added in the recent months, like audio, which is awesome because you no longer have to separately set up a Skype call just to be able to hear the person[s] you’re collaborating with.

Summary
Overall Visual Studio 2019 delivers great stuff and I am personally excited for Live Share. You download Visual Studio 2019 from here. Please do share you feedback and suggestion.