New Visual Studio 17.5 preview adds a spell checker for C#, C++, and Markdown files

Microsoft recently released the third preview build of Visual Studio 17.5 and one of the notable additions was a spell checker, which has been enabled for C#, C++, and Markdown files. Out of the box, the spell checker is enabled by default but if you don’t like it you can always disable it under Edit > Advanced > Toggle Text Spell Checker.

Similar to spell checkers in other programs, Visual Studio will highlight any suspected mistakes and will show a context menu when you go to address the mistake, you can also use Alt+Enter to bring the menu up. From the menu, you can replace the type with words from various dictionaries you have enabled, ignore the suggestion, or disable the spell checker.

If you’re editing C++ or C# documents and accept the spelling change for an identifier, the tool will also perform a refactor of your code to update all the other instances of the identifier so that your code doesn’t throw any errors the next time you attempt to compile it. When you choose to ignore a suggestion, Visual Studio will create an exclusion.dic file in your AppData directory and add the word, Visual Studio will then continue to ignore this word across all of your Visual Studio instances so the spell checker doesn’t begin to get annoying.

Visual Studio 17.5 Preview 3 came out a couple of days ago and is available for download if you want it. Just head over to the Visual Studio preview website and press the download button to get started. Refer to Microsoft’s blog post from earlier this week to get a comprehensive overview of the new features in this build.

New Visual Studio 17.5 preview adds a spell checker for C#, C++, and Markdown files