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Discussion on: I'm a Visual Studio PM at Microsoft, working on developer services like Live Share. Ask Me Anything!

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turnerj profile image
James Turner

Haven't had a chance to use Live Share (you kinda need to have someone else to Live Share with haha) but hands down, Visual Studio is my jam - such a sweet piece of software. VS Code is alright (I used it previously for PHP/JS development) and has one or two features I would like in Visual Studio like committing individual lines of code in Git via a UI.

I do think there is room to improve with Visual Studio, little things like basically having the functionality of BuildVision built-into Visual Studio as it surpasses the current built-in functionality or having Code Coverage support like what can be achieved from CodeRush but otherwise, I am a very happy dev.

My question for you though, besides probably Live Share, what is your favourite project you have worked on?

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lostintangent profile image
Jonathan Carter • Edited

I’m not too familiar with BuildVision, but it looks really cool! Out of curiosity: what are the primary capabilities it provides that you’d like to see in VS? Breaking down the build time by project? Something else?

As a total aside, I might reach out to the BuildVision folks and discuss Live Share integration, since it would be cool to ensure that all guests could see the build info within a collaboration session. So thanks for the heads up here 😁

Regarding my favorite non-Live Share project: it would have to be CodePush. I loved working closely with the React Native ecosystem after it had just formed, and I really really enjoyed working with companies to help them increase their mobile release velocity. I would get “thank you!” e-mails nearly every day, due to folks being able to hot fix critical bugs in seconds, as opposed to hours or days. It feels really good to enable devs to be “heroes” for their team and customers.

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turnerj profile image
James Turner

So this is what a typical/default build output would look like in Visual Studio for a solution of mine:

Now here is BuildVision of the same solution:

Like it isn't really telling anything terribly new besides the time to build individual projects, it is just representing the information differently. The current "Build Output" in Visual Studio is very console-esque in a program that is designed to provide us UI ways to handle many other situations. BuildVision is like the natural progression by grouping information better, showing the building configurations more easily, how long projects are building for, simple view over the build order (as you can see which builds are waiting for what) etc.

Even little things like cancelling a build, for the life of me I don't actually know how to do it without the nice obvious button in the BuildVision dialog.

Really, it is the UX of it more than any specific feature. It feels like the more "IDE" way to have the information displayed rather than a raw output.