Recently, I made a short blog post about installing Visual Studio 2019. Today I’d like to open it up and take a look at the “First Impressions”.

Personally, I like the minimalist approach we see in the Splash Page. I can see recently worked projects, I see that they are hosted in Github or VisualStudio.com, and I can easily clone, create, or open a project.

If we decide to clone a project, the Clone dialog is similarly minimalist. Paste in a repo URL, select the path locally, and it’s done. Personally, I’d like the option to add my Github or VisualStudio.com login, and select from that (similar to Source Tree and other Git GUIs), but it’s not a big deal. Maybe we’ll get that in the final release.

Creating a new project is the other place with significant changes. As you can see, there is a list of recently used templates (which is empty, since this is my first time to open the application), as well as a list of common templates. Finally, you can search to find a specific template.

Conclusion

I like where VS2019 is headed! It’s using a clean, minimalist style, and seems to focus in on the areas we actually use as developers. What are your thoughts?