A new start page for Visual Studio 2017

This blog post is a part of Visual Studio 2017 New feature Series

Recently Microsoft has released a new version of Visual Studio 2017 and as usual, there are tons of features available with Visual Studio 2017. Visual Studio has always been one of my favorite IDE. We are going to look into all the features one by one. The first thing when you launch a New instance of the Visual studio will launch a start page. So in this blog post, we are going to explore what’s new in start page of Visual Studio 2017.

A new start page for visual studio 2017

The first thing once you load visual studio 2017 will have a start page. It has been divided into three columns. The first column contains Get Started and Recent sections. The second column contains Open Project and New Project section and the third column contains Developer new section. By default when you load Visual Studio it looks like following.

Get Started and Recent Section of Start Page:

Get Started section of Visual Studio 2017 contains how you can get started with Visual Studio. It contains a variety of links including how to get started with Visual studio to how to extend visual studio.



The recent section contains recently open projects. It is divided into two part Today and Last week. Today section contains the link to the project that is opened today in Visual Studio.  Last week section contains projects that are used during last week.

Open and New Project Section:

The open section contains four things.

1. A link to connect Visual Studio team services from where you can directly connect to a team services project and open it from there.
2. Open Project/Solution: - Open project or solution works in same as the earlier version of Visual Studio. It open project or solution available on your computer.
3. Open Folder: - It will open a folder available on your computer and then display all the code files available in that particular folder.
4. Open Web Site: This works same as earlier of Visual Studio. It opens an ASP.NET Web Sites available on your local computer.

New Project is brand new in Visual Studio 2017. By default, it shows the recent project's templates you recently used and also there is search box to search the templates available in Visual studio 2017.


Even you search templates via putting some text in the search box like following.


So now to create a new solution or project you don’t have go to file menu. You can directly create a new project from start page itself.

Developer News Section:

This developer new section contains new feeds from various sites.

Customize Start page in Visual Studio 2017:

Like earlier edition of Visual Studio, you can also customize the start page of Visual Studio 2017. There is an option available for the same under Tools-> Options menu. Select environment and Goto Startup following dialog will come.




Here you configure options like At startup what should be shown. You can also setup time to download the content of developer news. Also, you can also use customize start page.

That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more!!.