Microsoft is giving developers insight into the changes they can expect in the upcoming release of its suite of development tools Visual Studio 2019. As part of the release, Microsoft will be updating the theme, icon and splash screens as well as providing new ways for developers to get to their code faster.
Microsoft first announced Visual Studio 2019 in June of this year. According to the company, VS 2019 will continue its focus on making VS fast, reliable, product, easy to use and easy to get started.
“Over the years, we’ve learned that sharing the evolution of Visual Studio, with you – our users – early and often helps us to deliver the best possible experience for our community,” the Visual Studio team wrote in its blog.
As part of the update, Microsoft will be implementing a new start window to provide fast access to common actions such as cloning or checking out code, opening a project or solution, opening a local folder and creating a new project. “Through research and observation, we identified opportunities to simplify the choices that you must make during the most crucial steps of getting started with Visual Studio. We realized we needed to remove what we call ‘off-ramps’ from the experience and provide you with the best paths forward to your code,” the team wrote.
In addition, the team explained it made sure to maintain the list of recent projects and folders as much as possible since more than 90 percent of users leverage this.
Other ways Visual Studio 2019 will make it easier to launch developer code is with a new streamlined Git-first workflow and an update to the user experience when creating a new project.
The team also made several changes to increase productivity such moving the search UI, changing the location team collaboration to be closer to the user account, and cleaning up the default iconography. “These small changes allow us to reclaim vital space in the IDE … allowing for larger tool windows, more space for your code, and faster access … to the tools and commands that matter to you,” the team wrote.
The full roadmap is available here.
