Windows 10: A preview of UX and UI changes in Visual Studio 2019

Brink · Nov 12, 2018

Over the years, we’ve learned that sharing the evolution of Visual Studio, with you – our users – early and often helps us to deliver the best possible experience for our community. We’re excited to share today that, as part of the development of Visual Studio 2019, we’ve been looking to refresh our theme, update our product icon and splash screens, and help you get to your code faster. I’d like to walk you through our thinking behind the changes and show off the resulting user experience that you’ll encounter every day. By leaving a comment below or suggesting a feature (or reporting a bug!) in Developer Community, you have a chance to provide input into the design of the product, early in the process.

Updating our product icon

Visual Studio 2017 icon (left) and the new Visual Studio 2019 icon (right)

The first change you might notice is the refresh of our product and preview icons. We work on improving our icons for each release of Visual Studio so that you can quickly spot which version of Visual Studio you’re opening and using. We caught some usability issues around the style of the icon in the early stages of releasing Visual Studio 2017 and we’re focused on addressing these issues for Visual Studio 2019.

One thing that came up was that the current icon’s flat style rendered it almost invisible against a background with a similar color. By adopting the Fluent Design System approach to depth, lighting, and materials, we’ve visually enhanced the icon so that it’s much more visible against a variety of backgrounds.

The new Visual Studio 2019 icon in the taskbar and start menu

We’re always learning about new situations and environments where the Visual Studio logo might appear. We keep improving its legibility, reducing the chance that it will get lost on a similar-colored background.

The Visual Studio 2019 release icon (left) next to the Visual Studio 2019 Preview icon (right)

Another challenge we faced was the difference between a Preview and final RTM version of Visual Studio. Our product icon is the obvious way for us to be able to communicate this difference, but this proved difficult with the Visual Studio 2017 icon set. For Visual Studio 2017, the icon was designed to be a part of the large Visual Studio Family. The method we used was to align all our icons with a consistent “ribbon” down the right side. However, this left less space for the identifying mark that distinguished the apps from one another.

For Visual Studio 2019, we started by removing any extra parts of the icon. We wanted to focus on the most recognizable element of the Visual Studio logo: namely, the infinity loop.

We increased the size of the infinity loop, which gave us more room and opportunity to show the difference between the Preview and Release icons. We’ve also taken a bolder approach to how we represent the Preview. By breaking the icon shape in a few places, we’ve maintained the overall shape of the Visual Studio icon. But we’re showing a distinct and accessible difference at the same time, suggesting a complete (if not production-ready) preview.

We’re working on a similar approach for the new Visual Studio for Mac icon that will debut in forthcoming Previews.

Easier to launch your code

start window for Visual Studio for Mac (left) and Visual Studio (right)

Through research and observation, we identified opportunities to simplify the choices that you must make during the most crucial steps of getting started with Visual Studio. We realized we needed to remove what we call “off-ramps” from the experience and provide you with the best paths forward to your code.

Whether you’re new to Visual Studio or a seasoned Visual Studio developer, the new start window gives you rapid access to the most common ways that developers access their code: cloning or checking out code, opening a project or solution, opening a local folder on PC, and creating a new project.

We know how important the list of recent projects and folders from the current IDE Start Page in Visual Studio 2017 is for you (more than 90 percent of you who use the Start Page also use the recent project lists), so we made sure to maintain its position as a focal point in the experience.

You’ll also find a new, streamlined, Git-first workflow that lets you clone public Git repos with just a few clicks.

Finally, we also reimagined the experience of creating a new project, with a new list of the most popular templates and improved search and filter capabilities. With the new design and step-by-step approach for selecting a template and configuring it, we believe that we have made it less overwhelming so that you can focus on a single decision at a time. You will also be able to explore other languages, platforms, and project types that Visual Studio supports and eventually be able to install them right from there.

A refreshed blue theme

The refreshed blue theme (left) next to the current blue theme (right)

One of the most noticeable visual impacts you may see when you run Visual Studio 2019 is our updated blue theme. More than half of you use the blue theme, but it’s looked the same since Visual studio 2012. We focused our changes around a desire to declutter the Visual Studio UI. By softening the edges around our icon buttons and toolbars, as well as tool-windows, we can bring forward the focus of what you’re working on. We’ve made small changes across the whole UI, which add up to a cleaner interface while still meeting our accessibility standards. We started with the blue theme so that we can get these updates in front of you, learn from your feedback, and then apply it across our other themes.

Productivity at your fingertips

The current commanding space (top) and the simplified version for Visual Studio 2019 (bottom)

Looking for opportunities to broaden the focus of the code and remove clutter, we started with the vertical space. By removing the title bar, we took the opportunity to reassess the uppermost layout of Visual Studio without drastically changing your workflow. We have moved the search UI to increase discoverability. With the upcoming preview releases and updates, you’ll find that search in Visual Studio 2019 is more powerful and accurate.

We now have a focused location for team collaboration using Live Share in the title bar. Grouped together close to the user account signed in to Visual Studio, it’s now easier to see who you’re collaborating with. This is built into all editions of Visual Studio. We’ve also taken the time to clean up the default iconography to align it better with Windows.

These small changes allow us to reclaim vital space in the IDE … allowing for larger tool windows, more space for your code, and faster access … to the tools and commands that matter to you.

Noticeable notifications

The new location, style, and icon for notifications for Visual Studio 2019. Coming in future Previews.

Early next year, one of our Preview releases will include an update to the notifications UI. Through conversations with you, we’ve heard that the current notifications location, icon, and states have been unclear to you for some time. To tackle this, we’re moving the entry point for notifications to the status bar at the bottom of the IDE. This new position avoids disruptive UI breaking your concentration, but sets us up for displaying messages from a variety of different services (from the status of a Live Share to a Pull Request comment) in the future. We’re also updating the icon from a flag to a bell, based on your comments.

An ongoing conversation

We’re excited to share these changes that we’ve been working on with you, and we’d love to hear your thoughts about our new designs, so please leave a comment below. You can also suggest a feature or file a bug in our Developer Community. We want to make Visual Studio better with every update and your feedback is critical.

Jamie Young,
Group Principal Design Manager
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Source: A preview of UX and UI changes in Visual Studio 2019 | The Visual Studio Blog

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Brink · Nov 12, 2018

Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2019

Since we launched Visual Studio 2017 in March of that year, it has become our most popular Visual Studio release ever. Your feedback has helped our team publish seven updates since our initial GA, which have improved solution load performance, build performance, and unit test discovery performance. We’ve also made Visual Studio 2017 our most accessible releases ever, helping developers with low-vision or no-vision be more productive.

Our team is focused on introducing features that make every developer more productive: better navigation features like “go to all” (Ctrl + ,), features to improve code quality like Live Unit Testing, and most recently, to enable real time collaboration with Live Share. And we have even started to show how we will use artificial intelligence to assist developers with IntelliCode.

Now, it’s time to start to look at what comes next.

The short answer is Visual Studio 2019

Because the Developer Tools teams (especially .NET and Roslyn) do so much work in GitHub, you’ll start to see check-ins that indicate that we’re laying the foundation for Visual Studio 2019, and we’re now in the early planning phase of Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio for Mac. We remain committed to making Visual Studio faster, more reliable, more productive for individuals and teams, easier to use, and easier to get started with. Expect more and better refactorings, better navigation, more capabilities in the debugger, faster solution load, and faster builds. But also expect us to continue to explore how connected capabilities like Live Share can enable developers to collaborate in real time from across the world and how we can make cloud scenarios like working with online source repositories more seamless. Expect us to push the boundaries of individual and team productivity with capabilities like IntelliCode, where Visual Studio can use Azure to train and deliver AI-powered assistance into the IDE.

Our goal with this next release is to make it a simple, easy upgrade for everyone – for example, Visual Studio 2019 previews will install side by side with Visual Studio 2017 and won’t require a major operating system upgrade.

As for timing of the next release, we’ll say more in the coming months, but be assured we want to deliver Visual Studio 2019 quickly and iteratively. We’ve learned a lot from the cadence we’ve used with Visual Studio 2017, and one of the biggest things we have learned is that we can do a lot of good work if we focus on continually delivering and listening to your feedback. There are no bits to preview yet, but the best way to ensure you are on the cutting edge will be to watch this blog and to subscribe to the Visual Studio 2017 Preview.

In the meantime, our team will continue to publish a roadmap of what we’re planning online, work in many open source repositories, and take your feedback through our Developer Community website. This blog post is just another example of sharing our plans with you early, so you can plan and work with us to continue to make Visual Studio a great coding environment.

John Montgomery,
Director of Program Management for Visual Studio
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Source: Whats Next for Visual Studio | The Visual Studio Blog

Mark St... · Nov 12, 2018

Visual Studio

Hi,

Regarding official blog (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2...) we can see

"We plan to have a generally available (GA) version of Visual Studio 2019 in the first half of 2019."

Look here as well - Visual Studio Roadmap ->
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/visualstudio/p...

For more information about this program better to use another community ->
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/...

Let me know if you have more questions

Brink · Nov 12, 2018

Announcing Visual Studio 15 Preview 2

Last month, we released our first preview of the next version of Visual Studio. After listening to your feedback, we have fixed issues and improved experiences in this preview. Download Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 to get the latest. This is still a Preview and is unsupported, so please refrain from installing it on your production environments.

This preview like the previous one, lays groundwork for the next version of Visual Studio. We primarily focused on bug fixes and a few feature updates. New features include; making the account settings dialog more accessible to screen readers, diagnostics improvements to help track down focus related issues, Edit and Continue for XAML apps, and simplified debug configuration in Folder view. Preview 2 also includes the latest Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova Update 9 which supports Cordova 6.1.1.

The new light weight installer we introduced in Visual Studio “15” Preview is also available for Visual Studio “15” Preview 2. You can download Preview 2 with the new installer. Remember, this is an early preview so the installer doesn’t yet support all Visual Studio features. So if you want a fuller set of components, please install Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 directly without the lightweight installer. Detailed release notes for the new installer are available at Visual Studio 2017 15.8 Release Notes.

There is one breaking change I want to call out. The change is in how Visual Studio consumes templates and requires that you define templates in template manifest files. This change will not impact anyone in this release, but it is a heads up that templates not defined in template manifest files will stop working in the next Visual Studio “15” release. This change will only impact anyone who authors Visual Studio project templates. You can find out more about this breaking change on MSDN.

Check out the Visual Studio “15” Preview Release Notes and Visual Studio “15” Preview 2 Known Issues for the complete list of what’s available in Visual Studio “15” Preview 2.

As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option in Visual Studio. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.
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Source: Visual Studio Preview 2 | The Visual Studio Blog

Windows 10: A preview of UX and UI changes in Visual Studio 2019

A preview of UX and UI changes in Visual Studio 2019

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