First steps with Visual Studio 2017

After installing Visual Studio 2017, you are now able to explore everything it has to offer for improving developer productivity. Following is a list of some of the features that are provided.

Start Visual Studio 2017 and the first thing you will see is the Visual Studio Start Page. It displays by default a Get Started section with a list of help topics, the history of projects you have recently worked on, a developer and community news feed, and some shortcuts to common developer tasks, such as creating or opening projects:

The Start Page is fully customizable, so if you do not want to see the news section, for example, containing developer news from Microsoft's official channels, then you just have to close the collapsed list or remove it completely. You can customize the Start Page much more, and you can look up the details in MSDN at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff425532.aspx, should you be interested in doing so.

One of the most important features of Visual Studio is IntelliSense. It helps developers to be much more productive by offering features like List Member, Parameter Info, Quick Info, and Complete Word. It has been improved in Visual Studio 2017 with some very interesting new features, since you can now filter by type (class, namespace, or keyword) and by CamelCase search.

It is also possible now to select the best matching results from the list of results, instead of just picking the top one:

The Code Refactoring and Live Code Analysis features of Visual Studio 2017 accelerate development and assure readable and maintainable code. For example, you can add missing namespaces or remove unnecessary namespaces automatically:

Here is an example of a Code Refactoring suggestion:

As the name depicts, the Find All References feature allows a developer to easily and quickly find all references of a method or an object. Coloring, grouping, and a Peek Preview functionality aid visually to better navigate within your code and really help to understand it:

The Peek Definition and Go to Definition features serve to examine the definition of a method, interface, or class either within a popup window, without changing the current window, or by directly opening the file containing the source code with the requested definition. The Go To Implementation feature does the same, but navigates to the implementation instead:

Another important feature, one of our favorite features, by the way, is Live Unit Testing. It requires Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition and allows you to automatically run unit tests in the background after each modification or compilation of your code. It can be configured and activated in the Test Settings. You can set, for instance, the number of test processes, maximum duration for each test, and maximum memory consummation:

There are many more interesting and exciting features in Visual Studio 2017, and we invite you to visit the official Visual Studio web page at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/welcome-to-visual-studio for more details. It is key for a developer to know his developer IDE as best as he can and to familiarize himself with a lot of its features which can then help him to do his job better and faster. So, do take some time to look at this before you start developing your applications.