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While replying on a question from Matt I was curious how others experience VS2019.

I have a laptop tablet which failed during traveling. It turned out to be the power supply, which did not match any of the options of a universal power supply we found in a city, but I ended up buying the same machine second hand to have a spare Pc, which contains the most important programs (the only difference with the "original" is that in that one we replaced the SSD for a larger one).

I installed VS2019 on this (clean) "new" machine so I could see if it works. It actually did run my X# project and finding an X# template by searching on starting a new project worked fine as well (not sure if I would have needed an internet connection for that).

Interesting thing is that VS2019 starts slower than VS2017. Just like VS 2017 promised to be way faster than VS2015 while it actually was slower, the same goes for VS2019. After a year or so the promise was finally fulfilled so I guess VS2019 will be a bit faster somewhere in 2020. Because my 1 machines are exactly the same (except for the SSD but the replaced SSD was about the same speed class) I could compare by starting the PC and then VS at exact the same time. VS 2019 takes 1 or 2 seconds more, sometimes the difference is larger but it was never faster.

But there's actually one improvement: Code Lens is now also available in the Community Edition. It's the only thing which differs slightly from the Professional version (except that larger teams are not allowed to use Community) - only half a dot is displayed for the feature compared to a whole dot for Professional. See https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/.

If you want to see what CodeLens can do, this is good source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visual ... ew=vs-2019. That also shows where CodeLens differs in Community:

"The source control CodeLens indicators are not available in Visual Studio Community edition."

Apart from that it seems the major changes are improved search options and a code cleanup/health check option. If that really improves anything I don't know yet. I hope to be able to test my main projects, see if all of them work (which would be a miracle but one never knows).

How do others experience VS2019?

Dick

Hi Dick

Your post raises some interesting points. I have been using VS 2019 (Preview Build) and VS 2017 Pro before.

Briefly I am very satisfied with 2019 because of what it allows me to do more easily than before. Fair to say I am using it for development way out of the XSharp Domain. Also fair to say a lot of the "ease of use" comes from the C# language itself. But there is read across to XSharp so my comments may not be entirely inappropriate.

You talk of timings - but to my mind VS Timings are not really an issue (just a second or so). VS 2019 is clearly loading more than 2017 (to enable it to offer extra "ease of use" capabilities to its users).

Just where and when certain capabilities came in, I haven't kept tabs on. But colour coding of files and so forth allows for an easier way of mentally keeping track of what files are in what part of your program.

Refactoring - OK it was there in 2017 - confidence it is being done without error is the main thing here. A lot of programming tasks are in reality trial and error, many times I've needed to change a foolishly inappropriate name to something meaningful.

Language - as the language (C# but relevant to X#) evolves more and more complex coding sequences will be integrated into simple language statement(s). This means fewer coding mistakes, fewer exceptions and so forth. More and more the integrity checking of user code can be off-loaded to the compiler with the tool (VS 2019 or whatever) providing the user with instant visual indication of coding error.

My two pennyworth.

Terry