Recently, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2017 on the 20th Anniversary of Visual Studio IDE. It launched on Wednesday, March 7, 2017. Visual Studio 2017 is the most awaited software from Microsoft. The first version of Visual Studio IDE was released on March 19, 1997 and that was Visual Studio 97. At that point, C# didn't exist and Visual Basic, Visual C++ etc. languages were part of this great tool.
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Time to time, Microsoft did many changes with every version of this IDE. Before Visual Studio 2017 RC, Microsoft had released Visual Studio 2017 RC and it was very popular among the programmers. At last, Visual Studio 2017 was released. It has so many new features as compared to Visual Studio 2015, which will help the developers to build, deploy and configure any types of applications very easily.
It does not only provide new features but also, it has integrated different packages in one place. It will deliver .NET Development, Cloud, Mobile, Linux and many others development experiences to the developers.
Xamarin is now a part of Visual Studio 2017 and is integrated with Visual Studio 2017. It is great news for the developers or the programmers, who work on mobile app development like Android, iOS and Windows apps and are willing to work with a great IDE. None other than Visual Studio can now start, using this IDE.
Visual Studio is not only a great looking tool, but it also comes with so many new advanced features. It is now much faster compared to the earlier versions. .NET Core and Cross Platform Development, which were much-awaited features of Visual Studio have come with Visual Studio 2017.
New features of Visual Studio 2017
Performance
Visual Studio 2017 is much faster than the earlier version of Visual Studio. It has a reduced start up time of IDE. At the time of building or deploying an Application, every developer wants the faster response from any IDE, he/she is working on and Visual Studio 2017 has tremendous performance in opening the solution, building the solution or deploying the solution. It has less memory utilization, which makes it faster. Now, we do not need to wait for too much time to configure our Application with Visual Studio.
Go to All
This is the new feature added with Visual Studio 2017, which is only applicable with C#, Visual Basic and F#. Using this, we can quickly find out Types, Method and even files in our code. In the large solution, where multiple projects combine, there are some difficulties to find out the required line of code very quickly but using Go To All (Ctrl + , or Ctrl + T), we get the results.
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Find All References
As compared to the earlier Visual Studio, VS 2017 improves Find All References functionality, which is currently applicable only for C#, Visual Basic, F# and C++. Find All References (Shift + F12) will show you the data in different format, it can be a Project, followed by definition wise or it can be definition, followed by path, definition only etc.
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.NET Core
Visual Studio 2017 released with MSBuild based .NET Core Tools with final 1.0 version. Now, we can develop .NET Core applications with .Net Standard applications. In this Visual Studio Version, .Net Core has supported by Docker. When we install .NET Core Component, it automatically includes .NET Runtime Core. NuGet 4.0, which is included with Visual Studio 2017 will manage further requirements of the packages.
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C # 7 Support
Visual Studio 2017 comes with supporting all the features of C# 7. Now we can make application using C# 7 features as well.
Installation
Visual Studio 2017 provides us two ways installation, one is Workloads based where we need to choose our development working area and it will install our all required packages and other one is individual component base installation, here we can choose components individually and install them.
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Therefore, nevertheless the installation is very easy compared to the earlier versions. Now we install only that which we require. We can also modify (Install or Uninstall) our components after installation very easily. It also provides installation in different languages, by default it is English but as per our convenience, we can choose our preferred language.
Live Testing
We can do live unit testing with Visual Studio 2017. It is only available with Enterprise edition. It supports many types of Unit Testing tools like MSTest, xUnit, NUnit etc.
Debugging
Several new features have been added with Visual Studio 2017, which makes debugging simple. There is “Run Execution feature, which enables us to run the execution from a particular point. When the mouse hovers over any line of code it shows a green button; just click over it and the execution will start from here.
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Connected Services
It is a new feature added with Solution Explorer and we use it to connect client to Service. It will be available for Web and Mobile Applications. From here, we can add Connected Services with the Application and use it.
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IntelliSense
VS 2017 comes with lots of changes in IntelliSense and now, we can find out the IntelliSense for the members like Interfaces, Classes, Enum, Structure, Delegate, Namespace etc. Therefore, it will be very easy to find out the code in large solution.
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Feedback
Visual Studio 2017 has an online feature to report any bugs. The problems or feedback can be sent to Visual Studio Team. We can also see the existing problems or feedbacks, which have been raised by the other users as well. To do this, just go to Help > Send Feedback. It might ask to login, (If we are not logged in). We can search anything, which might already be added by some users. If it is not there; we can add our problem, using plus (+) sign at the bottom. We can describe our problem and also attach any files and send it to VS Team.
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Mobile Development
Visual Studio 2017 included Xamarin/Docker, which gives support to make the mobile development easy. Now we can create Android, iOS and Windows Apps in Visual Studio.
Manage Connections
Visual Studio 2017 makes change to connect to TFS connections. Now, just click on Manage Connections and it will show you all the available connections or you can also add new TFS connection from this Window. Thus, if we log in with Visual Studio 2017, then there is no need to add connection manually; it will do all task automatically.
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Lightweight Solution Load
Visual Studio 2017 comes with an option, which helps to load the solution very fast. If we are working on the large solution, then it takes much time to load. However, in Visual Studio 2017, there is one feature Lightweight Solution Load, which enables faster solution load. We can just do On/Off this feature from Option > Projects and Solutions > Lightweight Solution Load.
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After enabling the lightweight solution load features, it will load the solution faster and look, as shown below.g.
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Conclusion
Today, we have learned about what are the new features in Visual Studio 2017.
I hope, this post will help you. Please post your feedback in the comments which helps me to improve myself for the next post. If you have any doubts, please ask your doubt or query in the comment section and if you like this post, please share it with your friends. Thanks.