Agentic Coding, IDE Debugging

You've built your software agentically. Now you want to (need to) debug it in an IDE.

You may need to add some extra settings.

Visual Studio Community July 2026 Release

See the status of GitHub Copilot from the Visual Studio IDE. Built-in .NET and Azure skills are introduced.

Visual Studio 2026

Visual Studio 2026 is now out. Previous versions are no longer supported.

AI Obsolesence

Interestingly, the race to build new AI features has made older versions of IDEs (Visual Studio case in point) obsolete at breakneck speed, the requirement to constantly upgrade is such that if you linger on even a slightly older version, the AI you relied on could be non-functional.

Do Not Commit csproj.user file

This contains per developer, per machine settings.

For example, when you last run a Debug session, it will have a record of what you selected in the dropdown next to the Run/Debug button under _lastSelectedProfile. This may also contain user-specific folder paths as well.

The Return of C++ Tools in Visual Studio

Today - C# programmers must embrace C++ development tools. There is No Alternative.  C++ tools container the valuable link.exe to create standalone .exe files.  Publishing .NET programs as standalone EXEs needing no runtime need this toolkit. Install it! Give up that 1.5 GB of space for some C++ tooling!

Where did the .csproj file go in Visual Studio??

Ooh tricky one.  Go to Solution Explorer. 

Double click on your project under Solution XYZ (1 of N projects).

It pops up.

If still stuck - GitHub Copilot always knows where it's hiding.

Control-Shift-A

Create a new resource in the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio.

Windows Application Packaging Project

The best way to build an MSIX.

WinUI Blank App (Packaged)

This is project template for creating a WinUI app along with a MSIX package for side-loading or distribution via the Microsoft Store.

Side-loading in the above case refers to installing an app outside of the Microsoft Store, usually by providing the MSIX package to users.

Recover Solution Explorer

If you have closed Solution Explorer (for example, to have a more complete view of your code) then Control-Alt-L is the classic key combination to recover the Solution Explorer.

Mermaid Diagramming

Mermaid diagramming was a concept of using text commands to create flowchart-like diagrams. 

This idea was realised in MermaidJs which renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams. It is a competitor to Lucid Chart.

Among the different charts Mermaid can build are the old database favourite of entity-relationship diagrams (E-R diagrams). Conventionally, we represent entities with capital letters and relations with lowercase letters.  The crow's foot notation is used to connect entities; intuitively expressing the idea of 1-many relationships.

Another popular chart is a sequence diagram. These express interactions between entities, e.g. the favourite Alice and Bob interactions in cryptography interactions. Entities can be expressed as rectangular boxes by default, but stick men can be used as icons too using the actor syntax.

Quadrant charts, or 2x2 matrices, can easily be built as well. These are common in consulting e.g. the BCG matrix, also known as the product-portfolio matrix. It helps to identify promising investment areas and areas which should be closed down e.g. low growth and low market share quadrant products.

Architecture diagrams can also be rendered in Mermaid.

There are also various experimental diagrams such as Sankey diagrams, which are used in science, especially physics.

Mermaid chart rendering is now available in the latest Visual Studio 2022 update.

F7 and Shift-F7 - Key Visual Studio Solution Explorer Shortcuts

If you have a C# control in Visual Control you want to look at, hit the following:

F7 - to see the code (or FN-F7 on certain laptop keyboards that overload function keys)

Shift-F7 - to see the control in Design mode (or Shift-FN-F7 on certain laptop keyboards)

Alt-TNP - Package Manager Settings in Visual Studio

This includes a feature called "Clear All NuGet Storage" which wipes out all the local NuGet caches.

Disk space is freed, but builds may take longer initially, since cached metadata and binaries are gone.

Alt-TNO - the Nuget Package Manager Console in Visual Studio

Alt-TNO in Visual Studio 2022 leads you to:

Tools

NuGet Package Manager

Package Manager Console

from where you can use Find-Package to find your desired packages.

An example usage:

Find-Package Newtonsoft.Json

Visual Studio 2022 August 2025 Updates

August 2025 brought new amendments to Visual Studio 2022. 

For the August 19th release (17.14.13), these included the latest MAUI install (9.0.82), a fix for a stack overflow crash when linking MASM-generated debug information, and a fix for the Live Visual Tree horizontal scrollbar (Live Visual Tree gives you a real-time view of running XAML code).

Versions follow the MAJOR.MINOR.BUILD convention, so August 19th release is the 13th build of the 14th minor release, of the 17th major release.

Visual Studio Magazine

MSVS is large, complex and suitably changing enough to warrant its own magazine. Read it well.

VSCode is Cool

Visual Studio Code is increasingly giving Microsoft Visual Studio a run for its money. 

One of the plus points of VSCode is it's lightweight as well as having built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js with other languages supported as extensions.