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Dirk Strauss
Dirk Strauss

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Visual Studio 2022 Releasing this Summer

It’s official, the first public preview of Visual Studio 2022 will be released this Summer. What is even more exciting news, is that this version of Visual Studio will be 64-bit. This means that developers will no longer be limited to ~4gb of RAM in the devenv.exe process.

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It is worth noting that Visual Studio 2022 will not change the types or bitness of apps that you can create. You will still be able to create 32-bit applications.

No More Out of memory Exceptions in Visual Studio 2022

In the original dev blog post, Amanda Silver (CVP of Product, Developer Division) highlighted the fact that Visual Studio 2022 will scale up to use the additional memory that’s available to a 64-bit process. The embedded video demoed a solution containing 1,600 projects and ~300k files loading in under 3 minutes.

User Interface Refresh

I know that some might cringe when they hear UI refresh. I know I did (remember the Visual Studio 2015 CAPS menu bar?). These changes, however, seem to be subtle and cosmetic. They are aimed at modernizing the UI and to reduce crowding.

Visual Studio 2022 refreshed icons

Overall, we aim to reduce complexity and decrease the cognitive load so that you can focus and stay in the zone ~ Amanda Silver

Visual Studio 2022 will include:

  • Updated icons that are clearer, more legible, and improve contrast.
  • Cascadia Code, a new fixed-width font for better readability and ligature support.
  • Refreshed and improved product themes.
  • Accessibility Insights integration that detects accessibility issues earlier.

Personalization has also been made easier to allow you to get that “just right” feel for your workflow. Allowing you to customize aspects of the IDE and sync those settings across devices. This is good for developers working on multiple machines.

Visual Studio 2022 will Support .NET 6 and MAUI

Full support will be included for .NET 6 and the unified framework. This is something that I am extremely excited about. You might have heard about .NET Multi-platform App UI or .NET MAUI. This will allow cross-platform client applications on Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS.

The past couple of months, I have been playing around with Xcode and SwiftUI as well as Xamarin. While this was a lot of fun, and something I will continue doing, I must admit that MAUI is a leap forward in .NET development. What’s more, for most apps such as web, desktop, and mobile, .NET Hot Reload will allow you to apply code changes without having to restart.

Innovative Features

Debugging is a big part of your development workflow. Improvements in performance in the core debugger will make debugging less of a resource kill for those with lighter specked machines. Flame charts in the profiler will surface hot paths. Dependant breakpoints will allow you to be more precise when debugging, and integrated decompilation experiences will allow you to step through code not stored locally.

Lately I have been doing more pair programming and code reviews with a colleague of mine. Live Share will now include integrated text chat. You will also be able to schedule recurring sessions by reusing the same link. If your organization has specific policies in place with regards to Live Share, you can introduce session policies. These will define compliance requirements for collaboration, for example, should read/write terminals be shareable?

The AI IntelliCode engine also gets smarter. It will now anticipate what you want to type next and offer that as a code completion suggestion. So now typing Cons will suggest a completion for Console.WriteLine.

Working with Code gets Better

Visual Studio 2022 will now include new support for Git and GitHub with built-in logic and checkpoints to help you along the merge and review process. Improved code search features will also allow you to search outside your loaded scope. This means finding exactly what you need, irrespective of what code base or repo that code is located in.

Visual Studio for Mac

There is also some love coming to Visual Studio for Mac with Microsoft working to move this over to the native macOS UI. This will increase the performance and reliability. I do wonder if this will be supported on the new M1 Macs. An update of menus and terminology across the IDE will make Visual Studio consistent between Windows and Mac. This includes the new Git experience from Visual Studio that will be coming to Visual Studio for Mac.

Final Thoughts

Some of these features will be available after the first public release. The changes coming to Visual Studio 2022 are exciting to say the least. Keep an eye out for announcements about Preview 1 in the coming weeks and have a browse through the Developer Community feature requests.

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