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2.5 Helpful Features of Visual Studio 17.12

With the utter disaster of the NuGet auditing out of the picture and a fix for the missing CSS files in place, I finally could work with Visual Studio and see which features I found interesting in the release note do indeed add some value in my daily work.

Search error messages directly from the error list

What was it a pain in the past: We get an error in the error list, then we need to copy the line to get to the important part and only now could we go on and search for a solution. That is now a thing of the past and we get a context menu that let us search directly for the solution to the error:

Directly search the error on the web thrugh the context menu on the error list.

This feature was a great help in finding solutions for the many problems I had with this version of Visual Studio.

Refresh the Find results

The more complicated your search queries, the more you want this new feature. We can search for code as we did in the past, but now we can fix problems and then refresh the exact same search to only show the remaining problems:

There is now a refresh icon in the Find results

I did not expect to find this little thing that much of a game changer – but it is so practical.

If you liked the highlighting of code on GitHub, you now could do that directly from Visual Studio. Select the lines, right click to open the context menu, go to the Git entry and click on “Copy GitHub Permalink”:

Copy the permalink to GitHub out of the context menu on any code block we select.

Do you host your code on Azure DevOps? In that case it depends on how you cloned your repository. It may work when you cloned the repository through Visual Studio. If you used a different tool or use SSH-Keys to authenticate, the option is deactivated (therefore the 0.5).

Conclusion

Besides all the problems, Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 offers small but helpful improvements. It is a pity that there are so many problems overshadowing this version. Otherwise, it may have been a decent maintenance release that fixed many of the annoying shortcomings.