Straight into the important links.
Download here
Release Notes here
There are a tonne of blogs out there talking about the release, so let’s just jump straight into the 5 features that I think developers will be most excited about. There is a tonne of new stuff coming out, but I think these are the features that will impact developers lives on an almost daily basis.
Inbuilt Unit Testing On The Fly
There has been addons for years that run unit tests as you type and let you know if your unit tests are falling apart, well now Microsoft has added the support to Visual Studio natively! Again Microsoft have outdone themselves by supporting not only MSTest, but XUnit and NUnit are also supported.
Run To Click
A new feature in the debugger, when stopped at a breakpoint in your code, you can now continue execution to a “point” where your mouse clicks rather than having to place a breakpoint every few lines and step through.
Redgate SQL Search
Built into every version of Visual Studio (Including the free Community version), is Redgate’s SQL Search product. How many times have you wanted to know whether a column is referenced anywhere, and you are faced with the daunting task of searching through a massive lump of Stored Procedures? Redgate SQL search takes care of this by allowing you to do a text search across every database object. It really is an awesome product and it’s great that it’s now part of Visual Studio.
Intellisense Filter
Intellisense now has a tray that allows you to filter the member list by type. This means that when you are working with an unfamiliar library (Or a new code base), and you know that “there should be a method that does XYZ”, you can now filter to only methods and ignore all properties. This feature alone makes upgrading to Visual Studio 2017 worth it. Note that the feature is not enabled by default, to do so : go to Tools > Options > Text Editor > [C# / Basic] > IntelliSense and check the options for filtering and highlighting.
Use Of Git.exe
Up until Visual Studio 2017, the Git implementation in VS was built using Github’s libgit2. For most people this was fine, but there were a few features available to you on the command line that weren’t available to you inside Visual Studio. Most notably, the use of SSH keys. While most people who already use Visual Studio’s GIT tools are probably happy with existing functionality, it’s always good to have the tools on parity with what’s already out there.
What Else?
Something else you are excited about? Drop a comment below and let us know!
