Top features of Visual Studio 2017 you should know


Visual Studio 2017 has arrived with brand new features and enhancements which will make the software development more easier and quicker. With some of its new features, it is going the give a better development experience from it's predecessor's versions. Following are the top introduced and enhanced features of Visual Studio 2017.

You can go through Visual Studio 2017 official home page for detail features description. I have highlighted here those features in short just to have a feel what VS 2017 is providing.

1. Advance IntelliSense

The intellisense has been improved a lot in Visual Studio 2017 with the introduction of prediction algorithm. For example, you can now type "this.LC" and it will show "LoadComplete" in the autocomplete list.



2. Fast Code Navigation

GoTo feature has been improved with fast navigation which will quickly highlight the types and it's references in the code base.


3. Connected Services

With Connected Services, you can see and connect to external could apps more easily. Azure apps, Office 356 and Hockey apps connectivity has been improved to manage your application.


4. Environment Synchronization

It's now more easy to migrate your development environment settings to different workstations. This includes but not limited to settings, preferences and development extensions.

5. Live Code Analysis

No need to integrate with code analysis tools or wait to develop, build and see code analysis errors post build. With live code analysis, the IDE immediately give you the code analysis feedback and suggestions with standard coding style and best coding practices as you write your code.


6. Xamarin Profiler

Building mobile apps in Visual Studio. This feature provides you with an enhance profiler dashboard where in you can see lots of stuffs regarding optimization, memory allocations, performance etc.

7. Debugging

"Run To Click" to execute any line of code without putting a debugging symbol there and "Exception Helper" that provides suggestions about exceptions that might occur at some line of code, has been introduced for better debugging support.



8. Live unit testing

You can setup to run unit test case to run at the background while you are changing your code. This will give you immediate feedback about the test case results.

9. Workloads

Are you installing Visual Studio for a specific work? Just select a specific workload (.Net desktop development, Desktop development with C++, ASP.Net and Web development etc). This will install minimal components required for that workload specific development tasks. It will install very less components as compared to Visual Studio 2015.

10. Developer tools in a nutshell

Integrated powershell, Docker and Continuous integration tools that will give a development team a richer dev experience.

11. Language Improvements

C# 7 : Enhancements in Tuples, expression bodied members, throw expressions, Pattern matching, numeric literal syntax, inline out variables.
C++ : Cross-platform build, Direct-X, latest C++ standards, improved compiler with code analysis, better security.
Typescript : All latest enhancements of Typescript included.
Azure CLI : Better integration with Azure Cloud and apps using Azure CLI.

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