Get the Most Out of VS - Tips/Tricks

Welcome to the other programming features of Visual Studio. My name is Marco Perro and I'll be uh covering some of the very old hidden features that have simply uh been forgotten over time with all the exciting new features that we keep releasing every couple of months. And out of curiosity, I was wondering who came to the previous talk in BSLE 2025 where we talked about other hidden features in Visual Studio. Awesome. Well, we have been really hard work at our recipe website from that previous talk. So you'll see a couple of improvements there and hopefully you like how it's uh going so far because we are very close to release and we just need to do some updates before we go in for the rest of the people. Let's go back. Um feel free to uh download the slides after this talk if you're curious about seeing the other things that we covered during that talk. They are available in YouTube and there's a lot that's covered there that will be also very valuable if you like the content of this one. So, Visual Studio is turning 29 years old. The big question is how long people have been using Visual Studio. We're very curious about that. So, out of curiosity, raise your hand. The people who have been who have never used VS, let's start with that. Awesome. No one. Okay. So we can get to the little advanced stuff. Less than one year. No one. Okay. Dealing with experts here. One to nine years. Okay. Awesome. I fall into that category. 10 to 19 years. Wow. Okay. There might be some features that I remind you of down the road. Plus 20 years. Okay. Awesome. Well, hopefully you'll be excited with the new stuff that we're adding to the product. All right. So, with CLI, Copilot, artificial intelligence, is Visual Studio still relevant? Absolutely. It's actually more relevant than ever because nowadays it's pretty simple to just let Copilot or any AI model handle the trivial tasks, the simple things that can be done in the background. while we now must focus on the critical stuff, the things that actually require a little bit more brain power. And the magic of Visual Studio is that it is what bridges that gap with LLMs to uh be able to find the solutions that we are looking for easier and faster. We have been working almost 30 years on adding a bunch of features and utility to the IDE. So what we're trying to do with BS is give them all to copilot and let them use it and that will be um where things start shining. So we're going to go ahead and start with the uh demo of what I've been working on for the past year. So I'll be You don't see my screen, right? Cool. Let's share screen. How about now? There we go. Okay, let's start. As I mentioned from the previous talk, we worked on a social media app where people can uh upload their own recipes. People can uh see them, like them, they can rate them, and it's a perfect resource for everyone who wants to learn to cook more and uh broaden their options. Now, sadly, we've got a lot of usage and there's a lot of people adding the recipes and now with uh us going close to production, we're worried that it's just not going to be able to handle the load of all the people adding recipes and interacting with the website. So, I was tasked with moving to a specialized library of um that an external team developed so that we can communicate more efficiently with the database and things. um start working properly. So we'll move away from the previous one and start working on that one. So to start, one of the new uh things that we've integrated into Visual Studio nowadays is Gits of module support. Uh that was something that um was one of the main asked in that area. If you click on the git menu manage branches, you'll now see a submodules uh tab there that you can where you can see all the subm modules that you can you have added and it will also tell you uh with a warning icon if they are out of date because things can happen in the upstream. So we'll go ahead and add a new one that contains the library that we care about to support the new connections. Whoever wrote this task was kind enough to give me all the inputs I need, which is the name, how we'll identify the subm module, where it lives, and the location in our project directory where it's going to live. We'll add it. It'll take a little bit to have time to refresh and it should appear now. Cool. So, now it's available. We have it locally and now we just need to add a reference to it. Go to existing project. For some reason, I'm outside of where this project is. So, let's quickly go there. So, this is the GitO module that I downloaded. Here's the project. And now I just need to tell my back end to use it because of course we share the same APIs. We have been talking about this for a time. So let's just add the project reference to the new project and everything in theory should build and work fine and we'll be extremely happy with everything. And let's see if it works. Well, maybe it works. Uh, thankfully we can debug. We're using Visual Studio. So, let's see what's going on. If you remember, one of the things that we can do is attach to a process. For that, we have the option to go to debug, attach to process. That will open the attach to process dialogue. Ctrl AltP will also open it. We can look for the site which is recipe. We can attach to it. And now we can start um investigate what's going on. One of the things that we can do is just test and see what type of input we're getting into our model. So let's go to the recipes controller. Let's get the recipe details. Setting a break point and see what happens there. I'll pick this one. We've hit the break point. And now I can hover over recipe and see that we're getting some information here. That's correct. But now some of the data is showing some type of corruption. So I want to investigate that further. Now there's a lot of ways to investigate this. Number one, we can use Copilot directly by clicking this Copilot icon that appears next to it. Or we can try to just investigate ourselves beforehand. This is the text visualizer. It appears on all strings. That's a very old feature. What we've added recently is the ability to do certain decodings. So probably we didn't decode. If we tried that, doesn't work. So now I'm stuck. I don't know what this is happening, why this is happening. So let's ask copilot to auto detect the format. This is available through the string visualizer. And now it has told me, hey, this is the text. It is basically for encoded as I thought, but there's an additional compression through gip. Okay, that clears more or less what I need to do. Let's see what's happening in the decoding function. The other way I could do it is if I go to the string again through the data tip and click analyze with copilot. As you notice, I have already the chat window open on the left side. And you'll notice that it will change a little bit once I click this button. We'll cover what happened in a bit. It'll start thinking. It'll give me its analysis. It'll give me a series. It'll start looking at the code and it's going to take quite a while. So if you're in a hurry, string visualizer is much faster and much better. I check the Okay, so let's go to the recipe request. Probably this one. Recipe pay. Okay, so this is the decode method. We can see that it is decompressing from the well uh de decoding from the B 64 string and then it is reading the stream directly and that's our problem. We're missing the um viseralization. If you remember from the previous talk and for those that um are new, there's something called code snippets. It's something that I can add and quickly code stuff that I do in a repetitive version basis. So, because I do this all the time and I'm preparing for this, I already did part of it for this talk. I can just double tap and there's a code that was missing. Very easy for us to go quickly through this code. This is still working. I already did the fix. So, we can just interrupt this. Or it just finished. It told me the same thing. I can stop. I can try again. And now it's working. Very simple stuff through that particular button. Now the nice thing about this is this is a long text. Well, that's interesting. Let's see. I can again go to attach to process dialogue and reattach. But if you notice there's the reattach shift LP is also a mechanism. So because we have already done that it will do so unless it doesn't find it. Did I close it? Oh, it's there. I don't know what happened there. Okay, we attached. I'm in the wrong VS that's why. Okay, here we go. Let's re reattach. Okay, now we're there. And let's try again. We stop at the break point. We can go and investigate why the text is very long. And you'll notice that I keep doing this. It gets tiresome. So, I'll just pin it. Pin the ed tips are great because I can just keep it here. It will be stored in your user settings. So, that thing will just stay constantly every time you open the solution. And the nice thing is that you can just keep it there. You can keep stepping and you'll be able to see it multiple times. What many people don't know is that you don't necessarily have to pin it to the same source location. You can click the pin icon again and that will cause it to float on the screen location. So now it always stays there. Pin data tips also have some additional features like comments. This will be stored. So if you have very long uh debugging sessions, you can start adding comments just to remind yourself of what you were doing there. So this is too long. And that's save. You can keep it there as a note. And what you can also do is share them. When we start setting break points, which we mentioned that you can export and import them as an XML file that then other people can use it so that someone else more senior maybe can help someone else debug something and give them clues. Pinda tips also support that. Sadly, this is a more hidden feature. What you'll need to do is go to view other windows command window and you can access a bunch of different commands more or less the same things that you would access through the UI through this window. So in this case I can do debug dot export data tips and now I can save the data tip as let's go here data tips. And now it's safe. It's great. I can go ahead and unload it and remove it. It's gone. But then I can just go here debug import data tips select the file and it will appear and you have that um in case it's useful. So continuing with this investigation, we have the description. It's super long. We can try and investigate why it's super long. But the most important thing is that going back to the text visualizer, we've added somewhat recently a new feature to search within the visualizer for very long strings. There's it's not an obvious entry point and it crashed. That's new live demos. Okay, let's close this one. This doesn't like me. Oh, there we go. Okay, let's go back. Okay, let's go here. Let's go to a recipe. Let's select the text visualizer. Okay. Now to search just press Ctrl+ F and you'll get the same experience as in the editor. You can do um let's say history and you can search for things forward previous you can find all it will open a new tool window where you can see everything and maybe you're interested in you can also look at different uh scopes for your search with all the different filters. So that's something that's not that obvious that you can do from there. Cool. Any questions so far? No. Awesome. Okay, let's move on. It appears that things are ready. People thought that we would run into problems, so they decided to give us a very useful uh unit test to make sure that everything's ready before I just say I'm done. So we can go to test test explorer. I see that there's my single test because we are always ready for this. Am I debugging? Yep. Let's stop debugging. All right, let's run the test. Cool. Everything passed. We are ready. So that means that we have absolutely everything. We can mark this as complete and move on. Now, I was also tasked with investigating an issue in the app where it appears to hang. Now, we have a bunch of different functionality for um handling this. I can let the CLI handle it or I can let VS do the work. You can simply copy the uh URL of the bug to the copilot chat window and it will start doing the investigation. Now the important thing is that once I do this as you've seen in many other copilot demos, it will start doing what the CLI would do. It's tag analysis. It's trying to figure out based on the description what's going on. Now, of course, there's cases in which this is useful, but in this case, it's a particular hard bug. It doesn't repro every time. So, it will have a little bit of a hard time trying to reproduce it. So, instead of that, we can go into this lower portions which shows different available agents that we can use. And for some reason, things are I might need to log in again. All right, let me close this and reopen. Probably a crash. Okay, let's start. Okay, things seem to be nice now. Cool. Okay, so as I mentioned, agent preview will try to do the static analysis, but there's a lot of different ones. And in this case, we want to use debugger because debugger will actually be able to start analyzing the issue using all of the different debugger tools that uh we provided over the years like um stack frame during live debugging. It will start saying break points. It will start uh checking locals and the state of the application as it happens. failing to connect for some reason, but that's okay. Let's debug it. The Reaper steps are essentially trying to add a new recipe. It fails and people don't know why. So, why don't we try to do salad nice? Well, that's nice. Let's look for some salad image. This is fine. Let's add it here. Now ingredients. Let's say one over gene. and one cup of couscous. It's a couscous salad and directions. Okay, let's publish the recipe. I need to remove this. Okay, continue. And it's stuck. It will not move from there. As the hang explained, I can go ahead and press the break all that one will start. Um, we'll stop at where we're waiting and we have this useful thread waiting banner with analyze by copilot. Again, this will trigger the chat window with the debugger agent selected, which again will use all of the different debugger tools that we've added. And now it'll start analyzing same break points and doing whatever it needs. If I tried to do this without uh BS, it would have had a hard time because there's absolutely um no code issue uh per se. It is an input issue uh when connecting to a database and it does require um going through and uh inspecting the the data live which the CLI would not be able to. So while that is working, we can take a look at the side again. Yes. Mhm. Just that. you can let it uh try to investigate by um giving it um several instructions of things to try and it will start trying to debug and cause the issue to reproduce. Does that make sense? So essentially um it is live debugging. It kind of requires your input. Um but it is possible if you for example have a dump uh with the exception. BS can analyze with copilot those dumps analyze those exceptions and try to look at the input that was that triggered the exception and it will correlate that with the code to try and give you the solution. Correct. Yes. If if the input is in the code that caused the exception, it should be able to read it, find it, and analyze it to give you uh an hypothesis of what is happening. Yeah. Um, it only has access to what's uh in the program memory, in the process memory. So, it won't have access to logs, but it will have access to everything um that you would in Visual Studio. So, if the clue is there, it will find it. Now, this is taking a little longer than I expected. There it goes. All right, it found the deadlock. It applies the fixes going. Cool. It finished. This is everything that's required to fix it. I can say sure go ahead and as we showed in the previous talk we can go through the git tooling to publish the PR and um get it reviewed, accepted, merged, and we're done there. The nice thing is that we can now have the CLI do that in the background or we can have our agent do it in the background. So we can just um continue investigating other stuff. Now it seems that we found the hang. It seems that we have uh populated the database now correctly. It seems that the website is working fine. Now we can just double check, make sure that there's nothing extra lurking around. I can see the recipe ingredients description. I can also see the steps, though that doesn't seem right. Steps also don't seem right. Okay, it seems there's an issue with the steps. So, that's something that also needs to be investigated. Again, let's just add a break point. Same location. Let's open the details. Let's check the steps. There's 11 steps here. I open the enumeral visualizer and I'll notice that the steps are in order. So it's definitely not something with the coding. It's not something with the database. Things seem to be correct. One of the things that we recently added that's not very obvious for people who know about the enumeral visualizer is that now you have support for the same data tips that I have been using during this demo inside the enumeral visualizer. So if you want to open a second visualizer, for example, to analyze a very long string because that tends to be a problem, you can do so. And you can also just quickly inspect more complicated objects instead of using the classic uh rightclick expand column, hide columns to see the different properties uh for a big collection. So it's clear that this is not an issue right now. So let's ask Copilot to do it. We can just go to agent now because this is not debugging. It's something in the front end probably and I can tell it. There's a problem with steps for recipe in the front end. Can you investigate and send out a PR to fix it? Hopefully, we're able to connect. I've got some problems there with that. Um, but again, same thing as if I was in the CLI. I can just without the MBS tell Copilot to do stuff for me and it should have no issue figuring out what's going on here. Okay, found the issue. Applying the fix. It should send out the PR. Now again here I could have told it to use a different work tree or create a new branch. Now while that is working we can go to uh do some other stuff. As I mentioned, we had um some updates are coming in the uh next insiders. Um one of the classic things that happen is that you have something in production, there is a crash and you get a dump with a uh with the exception happening and there's absolutely nothing. I can do the debug with native and I just get this. There's no symbols. It's optimized. there's no source code and I just need to figure out what's going on. I could click the analyze with copilot and that would start using the different tools that I mentioned are available to analyze everything that it can. If you go here below, you'll notice that there's select tools and skills. If you click that button, you'll notice that there's a debugger dropdown with all the available things that it can use to investigate issues. One of the new things that were added was the debugger disassembly tool. Once you select that, it will be able to start using um those new features to investigate to read disassembly, to read registers, to read um the actual process memory and come up with a solution much faster. If I let this one go on, it will be like I don't know uh something happened. I don't have access to the source. Please provide me with something. If I click it again to create a new one, this one will have access to those tools that I added because they go through sessions. And now it will be able to start calling as you see read registers, read disassembly and tell me, hey, this is a classic issue with pointers. It is not something that's in the source code. Again, it's something that was triggered by input based on the stack pointers and all of that different information. There's every different agent has uh its own set of tools and it's worth just taking a time to investigate what's available so that you can also enable disable them uh based on your scenario because that should improve a little bit of performance and of course because it has access to this specialized tools it will make less calls it will be faster and it will cost less in token usage because it can get to the problem faster. Well, to history, I can see um the other ones doing their job. Now, this one did the analysis and um this is the original one that finished. And it's like, well, there's a crash stop frame. Nothing important. Nothing interesting here. The new one is much better at telling me like um ner references when they're confir object um due to some internal state. So that tells me like um that is input uh passed uh to the hashing routine which the other one couldn't tell me. Now, this one's should be almost done creating the pull request. You'll be able to see it in a bit. In the meantime, we can go to the git manage branches section because as we mentioned in the previous talk, you can from VS without leaving the ID create a pull request. Now, we have the ability to review pull requests. Since this has been created, there's nothing here. But once this uh finishes, you'll be able to see it here. And we'll be able to enter um the pull request view. As you've noticed during this talk, there's a lot of things going on in my screen. And one of the main complaints that I've seen from people uh over time is BS is so overcrowded with stuff that it's very hard to do what I want to do, which is look at code, investigate code. There's full screen mode that works on the editor. That's with uh shift alt enter. So very um quickly you can just go in investigate what you do. Penda tips work here. So you will be able to see them otherwise uh you wouldn't be a able to unless you had like the locals all those windows. That's the nice thing about uh data tips. And to exit you just press the same one and you're back at it. While this is finishing, is are there any other questions? Shift alt enter. Sorry. Yes. The get subm modules. Yes. The purpose is to um be able to check out other repos within the same repo without having to bring all of those things to the codebase. So you can keep them independent uh from each other. Essentially, it will create a a tracking um file that you'll be able to see if you look at the explorer that will be committed and it will essentially say this is a submodule. This is the folder where it lives and where things are downloaded. This is the last commit that I have from that uh um branch. and the git subm module window will tell you um hey that repo got some changes you're out of date do you want to import them and you can say yes please fetch them and now you're up to date without having at all to modify your code so that will be completely um outside the working Okay. Is slow sometimes. Okay. Correct. It will not be part of your solution. That's why I had to go and add it to my project. Uh the demo was created to think, okay, this is an an eventual thing that we want to move to. Let's have a shared API so that it can just be swapped once I import this. So if you have like another library that you want to use um but you don't want to have like it checked into your code um you can use a a GitHub model for that correct because I want the reference but it's not um necessary. Sometimes it's like a testing library like you don't want it to be in your code but you want to use it and you want everyone in your team to be able to uh make use of it for validation testing um it could be a compliance stuff that it could be a tool or an agent that checks um that things are um working that are secure. There's a lot of possibilities with subm modules. This is taking a while. Okay. Might be for me to create the branch, right? Let's do that because that is taking a while. So, why don't we go ahead and go to my project where I have this recipe website, but it's not here. Here we go. Oh, okay. It send out something. Okay, let's send out the pull request. Here's a pull request. Okay, that was faster. Let's interrupt you since you failed me. And now if we go to manage branches, I'll refresh. And now I see assigned to me or my team active. I see my PR. Now I can actually see it um within Visual Studio has a description. I can leave comments um without having to link them to a particular source file. I can see the different commits if I click it. Uh, I can move to that version. Also, if I click the different files, I'll be able to see the diff view. Sadly, this one doesn't work um with full screen mode. I have complained about that and hopefully it'll be fixed soon. Um, but you can just move it outside. Make it full screen. You can leave comments per line. You can leave suggestions which are very simple things that you can act on. >> Yes, >> correct. >> Hey, there's a link. So, >> let's see if it works. There it is. Yeah. Um the important thing is that you can complete it, you can merge it, uh you can mark as draft and you can also approve it. So I can say like this is horrible waiting for author and you'll notice it changed um in Azure Dubs. It also works for GitHub. Any questions so far? Yes. Yes, that one is available. You can just uh download to a terminal. Um yes, sorry. So the question was um how am I able to create the pull request from the copilot chat window uh without having anything extra and the answer is I did have to add the Azure CLI locally and then copilot will use the PowerShell which you notice the window opened in my VS if I close this one guard here and that's where it started actually communicating with the Ashure CLI there are MCP servers agent does support it and I have the Ashure Dubs MCP server with all the tools that lets me get work items, lets me get um pull requests, builds and that sort of thing. Sadly, I didn't uh I wasn't able to get it to work. I need to investigate what uh happened there, but it is something that's definitely supported. Um yeah, that's how you start letting BS do other interactions uh through the chat window with other tools and services. Yeah, that's everything I had. If you have any other questions, let me know. Let it here for a little while. Yes. Yes. >> Yeah. So the question was if you can integrate this with git pull request and see them uh in BS. >> Yeah. So uh for that if you'll notice here there's repositories there's a bunch of other ones. uh this is the one that I demoed but you can have other uh Azure DevOps repos and al also GitHub repos and they will show here if they're in their directory you can switch to them and that uh PR view will populate and it will show you active pull requests that you haven't checked out and you'll be able to see them and um review them from there. >> Oh yes. So, uh, if we go back to the, um, pull request that I had, there should be uh, just Is it here? Oh, yeah. Is it here? There is a way to do it, but I don't remember where. Sorry. >> If only >> Oh, only the pending changes view. Okay. Yes. >> Yep. Is it here? Interesting. There is an option but I can't find it right now. But you can also use the get um agent and that will do that review for you.