Microsoft - A Big Thank You

1/03/2017 was a huge day in my career as I was awarded my first (and hopefully not the last) Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award under the category Visual Studio and Development Technologies. It was such a  Indescribable honor, and i have to give a shout out here to the Microsoft community for their support. There have been so many great mentors/supporters in my career over the past 6  years.Thank you  MVP Community Program Manager, my friends, colleagues, my company,followers and supporters for helping me to get my Microsoft  MVP Award for this year.

I hope this marks only the beginning of this new phase of my professional life and I feel so very lucky to be among the 6 technology leaders under the same category in Sri Lanka. Microsoft has always been a great supporter of the community, and a real partner in our ongoing efforts. I will make sure to work extra hard to give back (even more) to the community and I will be more glad to do it every day! Thank you Microsoft!Thank you to the MVPs who welcomed me and others have helped me throughout the years!

Visual Studio 2017 has landed!

It has been an amazing journey for Microsoft Visual studio , Recently marking 20 years of software development tool in the industry. Tech giant Microsoft has introduced the discharge of Visual Studio 2017. Users can obtain visual Studio 2017 by visiting https://www.visualstudio.com/.

Every Visual studio fan would have been excited about the release of Visual Studio 2017. Let's see what Visual Studio 2017 offers us ahead of the previous versions.

In one sentence, The builders can use Visible Studio 2017 to create purposes for Android, iOS, Home windows, internet, and cloud. “Code fast, debug and diagnose with ease, test often, and release with confidence".

Productiveness and efficiency , Developers life made easy:

Working with your team with one repository has never been easier. Now we can use the new 'Open Any Folder' feature to immediately open and work with virtually any code file without a formal project or solution around it.

Codebase Navigation:
Visual Studio 2017 refreshes the navigation experience with the following features,

Go To Implementation (Ctrl+F12) – navigate from any base type or member to its various implementations.

Go To All (Ctrl+T or Ctrl+,) – navigate directly to any file/type/member/symbol declaration. You can use the icons along the top of the feature to filter your result list or use the query syntax (e.g., “f searchTerm” for files, “t searchTerm” for types, etc.).

Find All References (Shift+F12) – now with syntax colorization, Find All Reference results can be custom grouped by a combination of project, definition, and path. You can also “lock” results so that you can continue to find other references without losing your original results.

Indent Guides ­– dotted, gray vertical lines act as landmarks in code to provide context within your frame of view. You may recognize these from the popular Productivity Power Tools.

With Visual studio 2017 there has been fre tweaks and additions to make the common
tasks more productively

IntelliSense – User can filter necessary completion list by category by clicking on the icons in the tray or by hovering over them to learn the keyboard shortcut.

Refactorings – use ‘Ctrl+.’ to access all the refactorings and quick actions we’ve added in VS.

Add using/Imports for types in reference assemblies/NuGet packages

Code Suggestions – code suggestions lee the user hint best practicess.

Mobile Support:
Mobile developers favourties both Xamarin and the amazing Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova are included in this 2017 release.  Xamarin integration in Visual Studio 2017 is a huge plus.

Testing and Debugging:

Visual Studio 2017 gives the developers debugging experience to identify the source of an issue faster with the following things,

The new Exception Helper

Run To Click

XAML Edit and Continue

Reattach To Process

Open for everyone:

Last but not the least, there is a FREE community version that everyone can try. Also
if you get  60 days of Xamarin University free if you download before 14 March 2017.

Here's a quick rundown of all the features that have arrived on the Visual Studio 2017:

Better startup and load time
Modified navigation with new features
Visual C++
Extended support for C# 7.0 and Visual Basic
Support for F# 4.1 language
Live Unit Testing
Introduction of Git features
Enhanced Visual Studio Feedback Workflow
Inclusion of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core libraries
Xamarin 4.3 support
NuGet support
Azure SDK for .NET
Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio
Developer Command Prompt
Installation Nickname, and other IDE improvements

So, what you are waiting for? Start to download Visual Studio 2017 and check out what's new? You will feel glad  as how i am. Cheers!