Iterating on your Welcome Experience feedback

Grace Taylor

One of Visual Studio’s goals is to help you quickly ‘get to code.’ We’ve recently experimented with Welcome Experience in Preview that helps you get to the code and tasks that you care about, right within the Visual Studio shell. Take a look at the original Welcome Experience design and its motivations in the previous blog post. Developers like you shared a lot of great feedback for that experience, so we’ve iterated once more. Read on to learn about the design and functionality changes we made to the Welcome Experience. To give this experience a try, please install the latest Visual Studio Preview build:

One of the main issues that many of you pointed out in the original Welcome Experience was how the design felt empty or small for developers with larger screens. We’ve addressed this by designing a layout that uses more horizontal space for larger screens, and we’ve made the elements more space-efficient by adjusting margins and removing one of the headers. This means that the design is now responsive, so the elements will stack nicely on a small screen too.

We’ve also received feedback that the “Most Recently Used” (MRU) section of Visual Studio no longer meets the needs of modern developers. Some developers had over 50 items on the list, while others had items that had been deleted from disk. Now, you can remove individual items, missing items, or all items from the list. This means that your Welcome experience will only show you the most useful information, and it will always be up to date.

Let us know what you think!

We understand that your Welcome impacts how you begin your workflow, and we’re excited to hear your thoughts on this new Welcome. If you’d like to give it a try, download the latest Visual Studio Preview today and let us know what you think on this Developer Community ticket!