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Hot Exit in Visual Studio

Hot Exit. It sounds like what you do when the fire alarm goes off. Or like Visual Studio leaving the room in a hurry.

It's neither. Hot Exit means you can close Visual Studio with unsaved changes and find everything still there when you start it again.

That solves a problem you probably know. You close Visual Studio at the end of the day with a few files half-edited, and it asks what to do with them.

Save them and you end up with code that doesn't compile. Discard them and the work is gone. So you click Save All, tell yourself you'll fix it tomorrow, and hope you remember what you were doing.

VS Code users stopped worrying about this a long time ago. Hot exit arrived in VS Code 1.8. Visual Studio finally has its own version.

What is Hot Exit?

When you close Visual Studio, Hot Exit stores the state of your session. The next time you start it, your open documents, edits and unsaved changes are restored, so you don't have to save anything manually.

Hot Exit preserves:

  • Unsaved files
  • Saved files with unsaved changes
  • Undo history for saved files, so Ctrl+Z keeps working after a restart
  • Your tab and window layout

The undo part is what makes this more than a fancy backup. You don't just get your text back, you get your way back out of a bad edit.

Enabling Hot Exit

The feature shipped with the Visual Studio 2026 September update in the Insiders channel, and it is off by default. To turn it on:

  • Open Tools → Options
  • Go to Preview Features
  • Enable Hot Exit

Remark: I had to restart Visual Studio before it started to work.

Hot Exit in action

Let's see it work:

  • Open a solution and change a file, but don't save it
  • Create a new file with Ctrl+N and type something in it
  • Close Visual Studio without saving anything
  • Start Visual Studio again

Both files are back, including the unsaved edits. The tabs are in the same place as when you left. Press Ctrl+Z in the file you changed and you can step back through your edits from before the restart.

 


Be aware that Hot Exit is not a replacement for a commit. But it is a lot less annoying than the save prompt.

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