Visual Studio 2019 (remote dev) tips & tricks

Mads Kristensen, Microsoft
Wednesday, 20 May 2020, 9:00 to 9:30 am EST

  1. How to work from home more effectively.
  2. Showing how to change VS 2019 pane layouts with keyboard shortcuts.
  3. Shift tabs to left-hand side so you get more vertical resolution for your code windows.
  4. You can also sort your tabs in different ways, e.g. alphabetically.
  5. If you have an under-powered PC, how can we help VS?
  6. Lots of projects loaded in your solution.
  7. The next time you open the solution, VS has to reload all that state.
  8. He changed options to not restore all that state.
    1. Rewatch to find where he changed those options.
  9. He switched to his web development window layout.
  10. Minimized tool windows are not loaded.
  11. “Reset Tool Windows” extension.
    1. Tools / Options / Startup / Reset Tool Windows
    2. Solution Explorer should be the only option you leave set to True.
    3. Visual Studio starts much faster.
  12. Clicked “Connect to Codespace” in the File menu.
  13. Opening a Git repo.
  14. Clicked “Create”.
  15. All of his updates in a local VS instance are available through the Codespace in the cloud.
  16. It will look exactly the same in both.
  17. He brought up Task Manager.
  18. Using 26% CPU.
    1. Screen sharing, broadcasting, VS, etc.
  19. He rebuilt the solution.
  20. His local machine is not affected because it’s all happening in the Codespace in the cloud!
  21. He can have multiple instances of VS running and it will have minimal impact on his machine.
  22. Some of these features are only available in the preview version of VS 2019, e.g. Codespaces.
  23. https://aka.ms/vsfutures-signup
  24. Enable preview features in Tools, Options.
  25. He install the New File extension as soon as he installs VS.
  26. Shift-F2 will create new files, will create types inferred from the name, e.g. IFoo will create an interface.
  27. Can directly type folder paths in the dialog.
  28. Watch Mads’ pre-recorded session for on-boarding a dev environment.
    1. Takes seconds!  “It’s bonkers.”
    2. “Modern development in VS 2019.”