What Claude can do

Wheelhouse gives Claude about sixty Visual Studio tools. Claude picks them itself; you ask in plain language.

Understanding code

Answered by Visual Studio's live Roslyn workspace, so they follow overloads, generics and inheritance, and see unsaved edits.

  • Find a symbol by name, and everything that references it, including in ASP.NET MVC views
  • Hover information: signature, docs, base types, where it is declared
  • Base and derived types, implementations, overrides, callers and callees
  • Everything about a method in one step: its source and the shape of every type and method it uses

Changing code

Every change goes through Visual Studio's editor, visible as it happens and undoable.

  • Edit files by exact text, regular expression or line range, keeping encoding and line endings
  • Rename a symbol across the whole solution, views included, as one undoable change
  • Apply Visual Studio's own code fixes and refactorings (the lightbulb)
  • Show proposed changes in the diff viewer for you to review first
  • Format a document, sort and remove usings, add and remove files, project references and projects

Building and testing

  • Diagnostics for one file in milliseconds, without a build
  • Check every ASP.NET view compiles, without a precompile
  • Build the solution or a project, and read the Error List and Output panes
  • Run tests through Test Explorer, with failure messages and stack traces, and repeat runs to find flaky tests
  • Profile CPU use and compare performance between two commits
  • See Visual Studio as you do: a picture of the IDE, one window or an open dialog, to check how a UI change looks
  • See the app you are debugging, running or stopped at a breakpoint, including any dialog it is showing

Debugging

  • Start and stop debugging, break, continue and step
  • Set conditional breakpoints, and break when an exception is thrown
  • Read the call stack, locals and expressions in any frame, and switch threads
  • Set the next statement or run to a line, and apply Hot Reload

Packages and data

  • Install and remove NuGet packages, any project style
  • Run commands in the Package Manager Console
  • Add and list Entity Framework migrations, for EF Core and EF6

Checking Visual Studio is ready

If tools fail in ways that do not make sense, ask Claude to run vs_ping. It says in one line what is wrong: no solution open, a solution still loading, a dialog waiting for you, or the extension not answering.