Top 5 anticipated features of Visual Studio 2017

Gone are the days of scrolling to the bottom of the list when attaching to the w3wp process. At the top right of the dialog is a new filter control, allowing you to enter in part of the process name. The dialog remembers what you entered, so it will filter immediately the next time.

Visual Studio has long been known to have a footprint that will top most people’s monthly data cap. With 2017, Microsoft finally split the installation into separate modules, only downloading and installing what you need, keeping disk and memory footprint as minimal as possible. This paired with the newly added command-line silent installation, this could be a winner for multi-team environments.

Visual Studio 2017 brings a few additional features to C#, adding value tuples, reference returns, nested local functions and more.

Microsoft has acknowledged the load time issues in 2015 by optimizing the load times of larger solutions. However, an additional benefit may be of smaller projects when switching between tasks. Context switching is a fact of life, and as load times decrease, the less tempting to run multiple Visual Studio instances will be. Will they have addressed this issue as well?

One of the biggest improvements of 2017 is Live Unit Testing. Visual Studio will now run unit tests as you code, helping you identify issues when working in brownfield projects as well as developing for Test Driven Design. This will help larger teams build quality into code, allowing Dev Leads to focus on building tests while teams flesh out the code. However, performance is going to be a sticky point, but hopefully Roslyn will keep it at a background thread.

This and more can be found on the official Visual Studio 2017 changelist page, and the press release