Your Visual Studio Dashboard

I keep thinking about a tweet that said you should tackle challenging problems and do everything you can to maximize time well spent, so your ecosystem doesn’t have to. 

Because once you’re distracted, it can be challenging to get back into the flow of writing code. Developers juggle a massive cognitive overload of different software, links, tools, bookmarks, tickets, pull requests, search engines, and online forums each day. 

But that tweet also reminded me of the last several months. For 3 months, I read every comment in Developer Community tickets from the last four years that I could find related to Visual Studio setup and the installer. In the end, the results were a combination of customizing Visual Studio and improving productivity. Your tickets gave ideas for minimizing distractions and putting your coding workflow together in one spot, like a dashboard.

You were brutally honest, and it was incredible.

VS Workflow dashboard early mock-up

Customizable dashboard

I’m working on an experience that helps you stay on top of what’s important to your code by aggregating personalized content from all your tools and resources. The dashboard aggregates everything you care about into an immediately glanceable and actionable canvas. You get what you need with fewer clicks so that you can be more productive.

It’s a dashboard composed of customizable widgets.

Here are a couple of examples: 

• View a direction mention in your Git widget instead of checking and searching email, risking being distracted. Check your team’s burndown and any open issues. 

• Easily track your feedback tickets, so you don’t lose them. If your suggestion ticket makes the Visual Studio Roadmap, you’re notified. You’re also notified if your reported bugs and suggestions were fixed in a release.

Feel free to let me know what would make this experience awesome for you in this survey.

• How would you build it? 
• What would the dashboard need for you to use it? 
• If it doesn’t work, let us know why.

Thank you for writing tickets, and please keep sharing your thoughts with us. 

PS Here are some of my favorite customer comments from my analysis: