Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 64-bit public preview 1 now available

Microsoft today announced the public preview of Visual Studio 2022 version 1. For the first time ever, Visual Studio will be 64-bit, which means your dev environment will no longer limited to 4gb of memory. This increased memory support will allow you to debug even the biggest and most complex solutions. Microsoft is also bringing the following UI changes to VS 2022.

• Updated icons for better clarity, legibility, and contrast.
• Cascadia Code, a new fixed-width font for better readability and ligature support. (If you like, you can try Cascadia Code today!
• Refreshed and improved product themes.
• Integration with Accessibility Insights to detect accessibility issues early on—before they get to your end-users.

Microsoft also highlighted that Visual Studio 2022 will have full support for .NET 6 and its unified framework for web, client, and mobile apps for both Windows and Mac developers.

Other improvements coming in Visual Studio 2022:

C++

Visual Studio 2022 will include robust support for the C++ workload with new productivity features, C++20 tooling, and IntelliSense. New C++20 language features will simplify managing large codebases and improved diagnostics will make the tough problems easier to debug with templates and concepts.

We’re also integrating support for CMake, Linux, and WSL to make it easier for you to create, edit, build, and debug cross-platform apps. If you want to upgrade to Visual Studio 2022 but are worried about compatibility, binary compatibility with the C++ runtime will make it painless.

Diagnostics and debugging

The ability to confidently debug your applications is at the center of your daily workflow. Visual Studio 2022 will include performance improvements in the core debugger, with additional features like flame charts in the profiler for better spotting the hot paths, dependent breakpoints for more precise debugging, and integrated decompilation experiences which will allow you to step through code you don’t have locally.

Real-time collaboration

Live Share opens new opportunities for collaborating with others, exchanging ideas, pair programming, and reviewing code. In Visual Studio 2022, Live Share will introduce integrated text chat so that you can have quick conversations about your code without any context switches. You’ll have options to schedule recurring sessions that reuse the same link, simplifying collaboration with your frequent contacts. To better support Live Share within organizations, we’ll also introduce session polices, that define any compliance requirements for collaboration (e.g. should read/write terminals be shareable?).

Insights and productivity

The AI IntelliCode engine in Visual Studio continues to get better at seamlessly anticipating your next move. Visual Studio 2022 will provide more and deeper integrations into your daily workflows, helping you to take the right action in the right place at the right time.

Asynchronous collaboration

Visual Studio 2022 will include powerful new support for Git and GitHub. Committing code, sending pull requests, and merging branches is when “my code becomes our code.” You’ll notice a lot of built-in logic and checkpoints to guide you efficiently through the merge and review process, anticipating feedback from your colleagues that could slow things down. Our guiding principle here was helping you to have higher confidence in the code you deliver.

Improved code search

Code search is an integral part of the software development lifecycle. Developers use code search for lots of reasons: learning from others, sharing code, assessing the impact of changes while refactoring, investigating issues, or reviewing changes. We’re committed to delivering better performance for all these critical activities in Visual Studio 2022 to make you even more productive. You will also be able to search outside your loaded scope, to find what you’re looking for no matter what code base or repo it’s located in.

Refreshing Visual Studio for Mac

Our goal with Visual Studio 2022 for Mac is to make a modern .NET IDE tailored for the Mac that delivers the productive experience you’ve come to love in Visual Studio. We’re working to move Visual Studio for Mac to native macOS UI, which means it will come with better performance and reliability. It also means that Visual Studio for Mac can take full advantage of all the built-in macOS accessibility features. We’re updating the menus and terminology across the IDE to make Visual Studio more consistent between Mac and Windows. The new Git experience from Visual Studio will also be coming to Visual Studio for Mac, beginning with the introduction of the Git Changes tool window.

Read more and find the download links at Microsoft here.