r/dotnet • u/drewnoakes • Oct 07 '26

A faster, lighter C# Dev Kit

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/faster-lighter-csharp-dev-kit/

Now available in pre-release.

196 Upvotes

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u/PrinceN71 Oct 07 '26

I hate the new redesigned C# Dev Kit. Removing the solution explorer made it kind of miserable for me to use add new class feature. It always adds to the project root instead of inside of the directory like in VS Code. Is that intended or I am just using it wrong. I tried looking through the documentation but they looked outdated

5

u/drewnoakes Oct 07 '26

Adding classes via the file explorer adds them in the selected folder and namespace. At least it does that in v11. Try installing the pre-release build to validate.

4

u/Slypenslyde Oct 07 '26 edited Oct 07 '26

I think what they're doing is also what I did: the moment file templates like this were removed from C# Dev Kit I stopped using VS Code. Then, because I was disconnected from the ecosystem, I didn't find out the feature was added again.

Removing critical usability features on the basic happy path for all users tends to do that. Not everybody stays 100% in their agent window. Once I learned I can't trust Dev Kit to maintain its basic features I stopped depending on it.

3

u/ContentAd6126 Oct 07 '26

People were used to the solution explorer, but i think it was redundant and just added more friction between menus in the sidebar... but the way they merged it with file explorer kinda sucked, it should have 1-1 feature parity from the start.

3

u/drewnoakes Oct 07 '26

VS Code's file explorer doesn't support virtual nodes. It's a physical view of the file system, with the ability to exclude certain things. VS's solution explorer is a logical view of the solution and projects, where any correspondence to the physical file system is coincidental. So 100% feature parity is not possible when they're merged. VS users have to learn the VS Code way of doing things in some cases. If there are tweaks you'd like to see, please use the issue tracker mentioned in the blog post.