Rikkas wrote and excellent tutorial on using Visual Studio 2017 for particle development.
It is such a fantastic tool, so simple to use and works every time, in my opinion, the Visual Studio 2017 UI is MUCH better and easier to use than Visual Studio code, and the Particle integration is fantastic, flashing over DFU or OTA no problem, it has tripled my productivity.
BUT : offline compile is not currently available in Visual Studio 2017 (as far as I know) , offline compile is only available for the free Visual Studio Code UI, will offline compile be available for those of us who have purchased, love, and rely on Visual Studio 2017?
We recently found ourselves in a foreign country , needing to make some firmware changes to a robot, and had to try to get our customer to organise us a wifi hotspot to get internet access to compile some firmware changes, it is a risk to our business. We would like to break the dependency on the cloud .