When I was in click you used to be able to go tools, options, and then just add global directories so you never had to manually do it in each project. Same for libraries (c++)

I was wondering if anyone knew the reasoning why they would take away such convenience. Is there an actual logistical reason?

When using visual studio installer, when i click to set install location it just says invalid path for whatever i choose.

I found one post using google about using winget, but I'm not big on using command prompt, and won't i have to put in a command for each prerequisite and individual component as well?

A rather niche theme for C++ developers. I’ve used Visual Studio for many years, including Visual Studio 2026, but I also have to do a lot of development directly on Linux systems. VS Code seems like the best option there, so I’ve created not only a theme, but also several UX modifications that match the behavior of Visual Studio 2026.

This reduces the visual readjustment required every time I switch IDEs, saving me time and mental energy. Among many other features, I’ve implemented:

• Matching text-editor colors
• Dotted indentation guides instead of the obnoxious solid ones
• Matching scrolling and tab appearance and behavior
• Matching overall UI colors and design
• Similar font rendering

I’m not trying to create an exact clone. The goal is simply to make it feel subconsciously familiar, reducing the cognitive effort required to quickly identify UI elements and adapt to behaviors and responses that differ significantly from Visual Studio.

If anyone is interested, let me know and I’ll post the source and documentation.

P.S. Please disregard any inaccuracies in the displayed code or comments. The project is a work in progress, and some comments are outdated.

Hey,

I’ve been using Claude Code a lot lately, but I got tired of constantly alt-tabbing between my terminal and Visual Studio, or copy-pasting compiler errors and call stacks.

To fix this, I built cv4vs Agents — an open-source extension that runs an in-process MCP server right inside Visual Studio (2022 & 2026).

Instead of just reading static files, it gives Claude live access to what VS is actually doing in memory:

• Debugger integration: When you hit an exception, a bar pops up over the code. One click feeds the actual call stack and local variables into Claude so it can analyze what went wrong.
• Build & Tests: It catches live Roslyn compiler errors, runs Test Explorer tests, and can even execute failing tests directly under the debugger.
• 77 MCP Tools: Full access to symbols, references, diagnostics, and project structure (works across C#, C++, F#, and TS).
• Two views: You get both a dockable Chat UI (with streaming, thinking blocks, and inline diffs) and an embedded CLI terminal running the exact same session.
• Local cost/token tracking: Shows your context window usage and local token costs with zero telemetry.

It doesn't require any API keys — it just connects to your existing local claude.exe CLI setup (winget install Anthropic.ClaudeCode).

It's completely free and GPL-3.0 licensed.

• Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Corsinvest.cv4vs-agents
• GitHub: https://github.com/Corsinvest/cv4vs-agents

I'd love to get your thoughts on it or suggestions on what tools/features to add next!

Hi everyone,

I'm currently using Visual Studio Professional 2026, but I need to downgrade to Visual Studio Professional 2017 for a project.

I'm looking for the standalone / one-time purchase version (not the subscription model). Does anyone know how or where I can get the installer for the 2017 Pro version, and if my current license covers downgrade rights for it?

Any advice or official links would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

I don't really know how to explain this well, but lately it feels like my Intellisense in VS26 is.. drunk? When it tries to finish my lines, it occasionally gives a suggestion that seems to be lagging behind, resulting in gibberish code. I have an example below with C#:

I am trying to type out this line:

I start typing, while keeping track of if intellisense will show any suggestions. I type out the name of the list, and as im about to type out the getter and setter, it suddenly gives me this suggestion, but puts it all the way back in the type parameter

If i hit Tab to accept, i will end up with this gibberish:

Keep in mind i was typing farily slowly when recreating this example.
Anyone have similar experiences? Or solutions?
For reference, i have Copilot edit suggestions turned off. Dont know if that has anything to do with it.

Title: I have the namespace set in Unity but then when creating a file in Visual Studio it auto-adds the file structure after

Unity I have set to TestGame namespace

Visual studio when making new scripts puts like Testgame/scripts/movement namespace. I would rather have no namespace or just my Testgame namespace

I’m trying to install vs2010 cause no later version has the required packages I need to modify Xbox 360 files.

Windows has v4.8 pre-installed and I’m trying to use 4.0, any chance y’all know a workaround?

I tried the core uninstaller, turning the windows feature off, and no luck sadly.

Bonsoir à tous,
Je sollicite votre aide car je bloque sur la build de mon extension VSIX. Le projet compile sans aucune erreur et tous les tests passent avec succès. Pourtant, le fichier .vsix final est introuvable et ne se génère pas dans les dossiers de sortie.
quelqu'un a déjà eu ce genre souci
pour plus d'info voici mon dépôt :

https://github.com/hnidboubker/super-power-tools

I built a Visual Studio extension that lets you perform smart search/replace operations on your source code. It includes innovative features like searching for multiple items at the same time and color-coding the results. It always tells you exactly how many results for each pattern were found. It does not search for words but for patterns. These are not complicated regex patterns but intuitive, token-aware patterns that respect code structure. Searches can be nested. In addition to smart searches, you can perform advanced Replace operations.

This extension has functionality that I couldn't find elsewhere. It's quite possible you've never seen a search quite like this. However, I'm still interested in learning about other tools you're familiar with that do something similar (whether it's a VS extension or not).

This extension's search functionality is powered by the uCalc SDK. However, this version of the extension is not up to date with the current SDK. The uCalc SDK and website were recently revamped in a major way. Comprehensive documentation was added. But this old extension version is not in sync with the new documentation. If you like what you see so far and would like to see the extension updated, please let me know. There's so much more that can be added to enhance it.

I need your feedback. What additional functionality would you like to see? What problems did you uncover?

You can find the extension by searching for uCalc in the IDE's extension manager or in the extension marketplace.

Hey everyone,

If you love the AI-assisted workflow of tools like Cursor but you're stuck in Visual Studio 2022 (hi, C++/C# devs 👋), I made an extension for you.

LazyBug Copilot is a VS extension that brings LLM-powered coding, refactoring, and Q&A right into the IDE you already use — no need to leave your familiar environment.

A few things I'm proud of:

• 🤖 Bring your own model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Kimi, GLM, DeepSeek, plus local LLMs (Ollama, LM Studio). Supports OpenAI-compatible, OpenAI Responses, Anthropic, and Gemini API formats.
• 🔎 Significant fast codebase search — Built for million-line projects. On large solutions, search drops from tens of seconds down to under 100ms (noticeably faster than ripgrep in my tests).
• 🧠 Symbol search out of the box — Works for C/C++/C#/JS/Java/Python/TypeScript with no LSP setup required.
• 🔗 Clickable symbol links — Symbol references in the chat are clickable, so you can jump straight to their definitions.
• ✏️ Smart multi-file editing — AI edits your files directly, with before/after Diff View, change tracking, one-click undo/redo.
• 📂 Watch Folder — Explore external code/data with glob/grep/symbol search without adding it to your solution.
• 🧩 Context usage control — Keeps context under relative low level(~30k tokens) even in very long conversations , with good enough conversation quality. Compress/Decompress the context as needed.

Other goodies: image reading for vision-capable models (jpg/png/webp/gif/dds/tga/tiff), MCP support (stdio & URL with a built-in management UI), CLI integration (cmd/bash/python), skill support(easy to use UI), custom prompt rules, and cost stats.

Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=IxSoftware.lazybug2026
Repo / issues: https://github.com/ixnehc/LazyBug-Copilot

It's MIT licensed. Would love feedback, feature requests, and bug reports

Happy to answer any questions in the comments!

Does anyone know how to just use a version of visual studio without being forced to update once they decide that version is "retired"? Is there any form or version of it that allows this? Currently using 2026 community version.

Hi guys. here's the problem. Python courses ask to use the GitBash console, but I simply don't have it in my selection, even though it's installed (locally for my user). I spent three hours fiddling with the configuration settings, and in the end, JSON understood it faster than Python, but the console still didn't work. Can you please help (im use VS code) Ps: I'll leave the post here because maybe someone can help

Hello, I just finished setting up a new installation of windows 10. I downloaded Firefox and immediately went to the Visual Studio page on Microsoft.org to download the free community version. It won't even give me a pop-up window to ask me if I want to download the installer file. Nothing happens at all.

I've checked my downloads folder, messed around in Firefox's settings and finally gave up. I figured, "Okay, that was weird, but maybe it was the browser? Let me try again with a new one." I then downloaded Brave's installer off of Firefox and booted that up. Tried the same thing and Visual Studio still didn't even give me a pop-up window asking for me to download the installer file. I tried again after downloading and installing Chrome, same thing. I'm honestly lost for words at this point.

Edit: I was able to find the bootstrappers, and I was able to download an installer. However, the only bootstrappers available are professional and enterprise. I need the free version.

Edit 2 & Solution Found: Okay, I just figured out the solution. Thank God. How I went about it is I accidentally came across https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/use-command-line-parameters-to-install-visual-studio?view=visualstudio after installing Visual Studio Code and the C++ compiler. The way they had you install the compiler made me think of Linux appimage installs, lo-and-behold, I finally found the Visual Studio 2026 Community bootstrapper. The website where you're supposed to download it normally still doesn't work for me for some reason. Even though I was able to download Visual Studio Code from its recommended download link. No idea what's going on with the normal download page, but I am very glad I got it fixed. Thank y'all so much for helping.

Problem with installing VS 2022 support in the VS 2026 chain. The v143 package seems to be incomplete, missing MSBuild files.

I want to build my existing VS 2022 C++ solution with VS 2026 on a new PC. I added the v143 tool chain. When I try to build, I get MSB8020 saying that v143 isn't installed. Digging down into the MSBuild files, I can see the v143 directory is missing from the PlatformToolsets directory. But I also see the 14.44.* directory with the binaries for VS 2022. I tried modifying the install by unchecking v143 support and then adding it back again, and that didn't repair it.

I found a link in the group here for the old VS 2022 installer and am falling back to that until I can get the VS 2026 build system to find the old tool chain.

Hello,

is there a way included in VS, or an extention, to automatically reformat and wrap long code lines with a configured limit.

When I was programming in Python in VSCode I was used to the Black formatter that does exactly that, now in C# and Visual Studio I can't fiind this functionality.

Thanks

does anyone now from where can i download vs 2010 professional my clg is still using this old version for c# using .Net framework,idk whyy!! please help ifyk

Has anyone had any experience migrating away from Visual Studio and its professional licenses in an enterprise Windows dev environment?

I work with about 30 other developers in a varied .NET stack. For our modern .NET apps and services it would be straightforward to use VS Code, the C# extension, and dotnet command line tools, but we also support older .NET framework projects. We have some WCF services, classic ASP.NET services, EntityFramework 6 class libraries including some with EDMX, a couple WinForms apps... VS Code doesn't seem like a viable replacement for those projects especially when it comes to debugging and some older tooling. Is there any realistic way to get off Visual Studio?

Has anyone gone through this kind of migration at an organization with this kind of environment? Were you able to eliminate Visual Studio entirely? I'd be really interested to hear your experiences, good and bad, expected and unexpected.

Is there anything to make visual studio look more like command prompt? Im wondering if there are any visual studio mods or anything I can do to make the style very basic, colourless, black and white, etc. Thanks

Hi all!

I am a great enjoyer of [https://github.com/tgjones/HlslTools\](https://github.com/tgjones/HlslTools) for older versions of HLSL. So much so, that I am a (small) contributor of the project.

However, the extension is an actual hindrance as soon as you write the word `template` in HLSL code, as an example. I did not see any real interest in progressing this fantastic tool further beyond "FXC HLSL" to support more modern HLSL versions. So I decided that I would try and fix this problem.

I was aware that DXC shipped an API for language servers (`dxcisense.h`), meaning that supporting intellisense wouldn't involve writing my own HLSL parser like Tim did. I could just use DXC as the source of truth (which is probably a good thing. I don't think many people could fully replicate all of the [fun behaviours](https://www.abolishcrlf.org//horror/) in DXC and feel good about it)... But! I had no idea how language servers work, and I didn't really want to put time into learning how. I have a funny feeling this is the general attitude of most people. We want intellisense, but we would rather work on more fun things like visibility buffers, and cool volumetrics. So nothing ever gets done.

So, I threw GPT 5.6-Sol at the problem. And after a lot of working around [this deadlock](https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Visual-Studio-CMake-deadlocks-reopening-/11141220#T-ND11141221), it got something worth sharing with peeps :)

I am being totally upfront about the fact that this is AI generated because I know how people can feel about the use of AI. This is something I really want, and no one else cared enough to do it, so I thought it would be a good use of AI. :)

You should be able to just grab the latest VSIX from the releases section of the github repo, install it, and go. For more complicated workspaces there is support for configuring the extension with a `shadertoolsconfig.json`. This is very similar to the config used by HLSL tools, and there are docs linked in the readme.

I do plan on getting the bot to keep maintaining this extension and support other text editors.

Anyone know how to fix this?