2023 – a year of community experiments

As we enter a new year, we wanted to catch you up on several experiments your feedback and participation helped us fine tune over the course of 2023.

A community experiment is when we identify features believed to increase user productivity and happiness, and then build and test it with the community of Visual Studio users. These are features that don’t have many upvotes on Developer Community, but other signals suggest that they would be desirable for developers regardless. We then publish the feature as an open-source extension and work with the community to get it Just Right™. This includes receiving bug reports and pull requests as well as collecting telemetry to understand usage patterns.

Typically, thousands of users install these experimental extensions to help test and improve them. These features are truly made by the community for the community, and here’s a list of the ones we’ve done together so far.

We started community experiments in the latter part of 2022, so we’ll include those early ones in this list as well.

Differentiating Visual Studio instances

This one was based off a feature request that didn’t have a lot of votes, but an extension for VS Code with this feature had almost 2 million downloads. This indicated that this would be a good feature for Visual Studio and the experiment was born.

The feature request ended up getting over 200 votes and the extension Solution Colors installed almost 15,000 times.

Result: Not included in Visual Studio. We need to do more work to polish the user experience.

Adding color to bracket pairs

This was a feature already provided by the popular Viasfora extension, which is why users didn’t have the need for an official implementation of this feature. However, other editors and IDEs started offering this feature out-of-the-box, so we thought it was time to take a second look.

The experiment generated so many upvotes that it became one of the highest requested features at the time. And the extension Rainbow Braces was downloaded more than 75,000 times.

Result: Included in Visual Studio 2022 v17.6

Comparing files in Visual Studio

This experiment was about something seemingly simple – comparing two files in a diff view. It turned out there were a lot of opinions from the community about the best way of doing this, so we felt this would be a perfect candidate for a community experiment.

Not only did it end up with over 550 upvotes, but the extension File Differ was installed almost 90,000 times.

Result: Included in Visual Studio 2022 v17.7

Copy with proper indentation

This one represents a special kind of feature or tweak we can call paper-cut-reducers. Over the years, we learn to live with certain inconveniences to the point we don’t even notice them anymore. As such, we don’t complain about them or vote for feature requests to fix them.

This feature fixes the issue of copying code and pasting it into Outlook or elsewhere, just to see the indentation getting all messed up.

The feature request ended up getting over 80 upvotes and the Copy Nice extension installed over 3,000 times.

Result: Included in Visual Studio 2022 v17.7

Get your developer news

Staying up to date with relevant news from various technology blogs about Visual Studio, .NET, C++ etc. can be a challenge and most people don’t. This results in many people missing out on events, training, videos, tutorials, and other things that could be helpful to them. This experiment attempts to fix that problem by bringing the blogs into Visual Studio in a natural and unobtrusive way.

With over 300 upvotes, this remains one of the most requested features, but it turns out that we couldn’t get the experience quite right. The Developer News extension got 3,000 installs, but it wasn’t enough to move it into Visual Studio.

Result: Not included, but a great extension worth a download (we still update it)

Surround selection

You want to quickly select some text and surround it with quotation marks. So, you select your text and hit the quotation mark key on your keyboard, only to find that the selected text was replaced by a single “. What you hoped would happen was that the selected text would be surrounded by an opening and closing quotation mark like in the animation below. This experiment fixes that.

Image Surrounder2, image

With almost 250 upvotes and 2,000 extension installs, the community favored this idea. It went from almost no votes to a highly requested feature.

Result: Included in Visual Studio 2022 v17.9 Preview.

Scroll document tabs

Some tabbed applications, like certain browsers, allow you to use the mouse wheel to scroll through a list of many open tabs. We came up with the idea to use the same gesture (mouse scrolling) to toggle the multi-row tabs feature on and off.

That way we could maintain the muscle memory of the users who were familiar with the feature from other applications, while taking advantage of a useful feature in Visual Studio. The Scroll Tabs extension got about 1,200 installs and the feature request more than 250 upvotes.

Result: Included in Visual Studio 2022 v17.9 Preview.

Image hover preview

Most developers work with images in one form or the other. Having a quick way to glance at the images referenced in code can help verify you are using the right image, but also validate that the path is correct. This experiment shows the image when hovering over a reference in your code.

With over 120 upvotes and 1,800 extension installs, this experiment was a success. It solves a subtle problem in a natural way and doesn’t get in the way.

Result: we are currently implementing it for a future update to Visual Studio 2022.

In summary

2023 saw some great experiments and community involvement – some of them made it into Visual Studio while others didn’t. For the ones who didn’t, they still provide value as free open-source extensions to the users who want them. And that’s what this is all about: adding value and making developers like you more productive and happier using Visual Studio.

To get all these features, make sure to update to the latest version of Visual Studio 2022.

We’ll continue doing community experiments in 2024 and hope that you’ll partake in the ones that resonate with you. If there are any features you think would be great candidates for an experiment, let us know in the comments below.

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