VS has changed in subsequent releases to where the (fragile) techniques used here are no longer functional. Unfortunately the IDE has not provided any ways to resolve the issues this attempted to work around. If the lack of that functionality is a concenr to you please let the VS team know via feedback. The more voices identify an issue the greater the chances the team will address them.
VSIX package to restore Visual Studio 2019 UI to preferred VS2017 style
This extension enables users of VS2019 to effectively revert some of the controversial UI changes made to VS2019.
- Hide the search box (again)
- Use the start page (again)
- Including news feed (again)
- Restore the new project dialog to it's previous form
VS2019 introduced a number of controversial changes that triggered some rather heated discussions in the user feedback. Unfortunately, the feedback was not enough to effect any significant changes (other than restoring the option to keep the title bar layout from VS2017). THerefore, after a bunch of spelunking with the debugger and ILSpy, this package was created to restore the rest of the most controversial changes.
In all prior versions of VS since the QuickLaunch search box was introduced, users have always had the option to disable/hide it from the menus etc... Not everyone finds it useful, and many view it as a distracting waste of space on the menus or title bar. Unfortunately, in VS2019 this functionality was removed, such that users can't disable/hide it. This package allows users to hide the search box again as was always possible in previous versions of the IDE.
VS2019 for reasons that surpass comprehension, chose to eliminate the start page that has been present in VS for many years now (though it's design has changed and even has/had support for individuals to create their own pages with the VS SDK) For VS 2019 it was replaced with a floating window instead of a dockable page, worse the window appears at launch blocking the main IDE until you pick something. This is annoying enough that it became the first thing to figure out how to disable in the pre-releases. Fortunately, the start with a blank project startup option still exists so that UI could be hidden. The command to load the start page, still exists, and with some manual customization a user can place the command to open the start page onto one of the menus. However, this still required manually opening the page. Additionally, one of the major benefits of the start page was still disabled - the news feed.
The start page contains an RSS news feed to help keep developers informed about what's happening with all things related to Visual Studio and Microsoft development in general. This is arguably one of the biggest values of the start page. (Some of us complained the reduction in screen space of the news feed in previous releases was a bad thing, so eliminating or disabling it completely is just flat out wrong in our view) Getting this to work again was the most complex and fragile part of creating this package. It is hoped that the VS team will see the efforts that we are willing to take on to get this functionality back that they adjust their planning and bring it back officially.
Start page Screenshot with newsfeed enabled (VS2019):
The new project dialog received a LOT of negative feedback from the first appearance. Generally the feedback is along the lines of "It ain't broke so don't fix it". In a blog article the team attempts to explain the rational for the changes. Though an important key factor is missing from the "data' they collected. (Part of the problem of relying entirely on data is that you have to interpret it and doing that without actually talking openly with your users about what the data means often leads to lots of missteps and frustrations for all) The missing information was that, yes people use the new project dialog a lot more than what was assumed (a problem of it's own), but what was missing was that there wasn't a correspondingly high level of feedback on the new project dialog (e.g. users were using it a lot but didn't have complaints enough about it to warrant any negative feedback) - so why change what people are using more than you thought, and not complaining about it!? That's not good disruption.
Fortunately, a happy accident/bug in the preview triggered a problem showing the new experience so VS would show an error, and then... FALBACK to the original UI! Bingo, the original UI was still there. So, a bit of digging revealed the preview setting to disable it was still active and could restore the new project and item dialog experiences
Yeah, productivity again.