According to a blog post by Microsoft, a new feature is coming to Visual Studio 17.3 preview 2, new audio cues. These audio cues are in place to help developers understand what is happening to their code and where they need to lay more emphasis. Visual Studio recently got its first big ARM-native, geared toward introducing and stabilizing the most popular Workloads used by developers who are building apps that run on Arm64.
This long-requested feature will help developers customize their own experiences thus allowing them to be more productive. Developers will simply get an alert in form of a “short and simple’ sound whenever the caret identifies an error on a line.
If you are looking to access this feature all you need to do is navigate through Tools\Options under the Preview Features option, then check the Enable Audio Cues for the Editor box. Visual Studio will then save the changes you’ve made and then register the audio cues the next time the editor is created.
According to the blog post:
By default, Visual Studio now has three new sounds. You’ll hear a sound when the caret arrives on a line with a breakpoint, error, or warning. We intentionally don’t play sounds unless you’re navigating around. When we first tested the audio cues, we felt that playing the sounds as soon as an error was introduced during typing was rather annoying. We chose the same sounds as Visual Studio Code, so folks coming to Visual Studio should already be familiar with these sounds.
You might wonder, what will happen if there is more than one error in a single line? In such a case, you will only be notified of the error with the highest priority, which will be followed up by “warnings and finally breaking points”.
Developers also have the capability of customizing these sounds to their liking. You can do this by searching for Change System Sounds in Windows 11 or Windows 10 to access the Sound control panel. Then, scroll down the Program Events box for the “Microsoft Visual Studio” events. Here you will find Line has Breakpoint, Line has Error and Line has Warning news events.
At this juncture, you can change these sounds to any .wav file you prefer or even disable it completely by setting the Sounds field to none. Let us know what are your thoughts on these new sound cues and how they will affect your coding process in the comment section below.
