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InfoQ Homepage News Visual Studio 2022: Q&A with Leslie Richardson and Her Team

Visual Studio 2022: Q&A with Leslie Richardson and Her Team

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Visual Studio 2022 is Microsoft's latest version of its popular integrated development environment, including many improvements related to Hot Reloading, debugging, code editor, and theming. Now it is available as a 64-bit application and supports .NET 6 and projects from multiple Git repositories in the same solution.

Microsoft has also worked extensively on the IDE user interface, adding, for example, a whole set of new icons and a new font, the Cascadia Code, improving clarity and readability. Thanks to the integration with Accessibility Insights, accessibility issues are now discovered and resolved before the product release. Every developer can easily customize the environment using themes and sync the configuration on multiple PCs.

Visual Studio supports many languages and frameworks, and it's available in multiple editions: Community, Professional, and Enterprise. Visual Studio teams collect customer feedback as part of its community-oriented development process to define the product roadmap. Recent releases have received many contributions and input from the community, orienting the tool more towards actual use cases. A clear example is the 64-bit support requested for many years by now.

InfoQ interviewed Leslie Richardson (program manager, Visual Studio Extensibility & Debugging) and the Visual Studio team to get a closer look at these new features and improvements in this new release.  

InfoQ: How can Visual Studio 2022 increase developer productivity?
 

Leslie Richardson, Harshada Chandrakant Hole (product manager - Visual Studio), Mika Dumont (program manager - .NET and Visual Studio team), and Grace Taylor (program manager II - Developer Tools): There are so many productivity improvements across the board, including:

  • Significant improvements to Hot Reload, which works for both managed .NET and native C++, and it saves you time editing your code without restarting the application during development. You can take a look at our release notes for the latest Hot Reload improvements and track upcoming improvements on our backlog.
  • New refactoring related to C# 10.0 and navigation, such as file-scoped namespace.
  • New debugging features like Force Run to Click, which will run the debugger until the selected cursor position is reached, ignoring all the breakpoints in between. Also, external sources node in solution explorer, many small changes in the attach to process dialog, many updates in breakpoint experience with the new context menu, temporary and dependent breakpoints. Here are release notes and a few blogs to give more details:
  • Editor additions like line spacing improvements.
  • We have improved the personalization experience to best suit every developer's habits. We've increased theming flexibility with the ability to match your VS theme to your Windows OS theme. We added new document management capabilities through coloring and customizing tabs in your workspace and other new features coming soon, which we've outlined in our blog post.

InfoQ: What are the benefits of having a 64-bit version of Visual Studio?

Richardson: The most significant perks of 64-bit Visual Studio are the improved load times and considerable reduction of out-of-memory exceptions, especially noticeable in large solutions containing hundreds of projects and files.

InfoQ: Could you tell us more about the Intellicode improvements?


Mark Wilson-Thomas (principal program manager - Visual Studio): The most obvious one is our new Intellicode line completion feature for C# users. An in-depth introduction is also available here. We hope the new line completions bring a significant productivity boost to your code editing experience.

InfoQ: How can the multi-repo Git support can help cross-team collaboration?


Taysser Gherfal (senior program manager): Some of our customers may have teams who work cross-projects hosted on different Git repositories. Previously, users had to either use multiple instances of Visual Studio or rely on external Git tools to collaborate. With multi-repo support in Visual Studio 2022, users will be able to work on solutions with projects hosted on different Git repositories, which means that they will be able to commit and collaborate without leaving Visual Studio.

InfoQ: Does Visual Studio 2022 provide new options for remote testing?

Kendra Havens (program manager - .NET and Visual Studio team): Yes! Remote testing in Visual Studio 2022 is available for local containers, WSL, and any SSH connection, as well as remote debugging of tests.

InfoQ: How does Visual Studio 2022 help developers find memory problems in their applications?

Richardson: Visual Studio has a suite of profiling tools that can help diagnose memory, including the Memory Usage tool, which can identify memory leaks and high memory consumption. Also, the Diagnostics Analyzer is one of the latest tools that can be used to identify common .NET issues in memory dumps.

InfoQ: Is Visual Studio 2022 ready for .NET 6?
 

Dumont: Yes, Visual Studio 2022 supports .NET 6.0.

 

If you want to try out the new features of Visual Studio 2022, you can download the Community Edition for free. Also, if you are interested in making the best use of Visual Studio, you can look at the documentation section on Microsoft Docs. Don't forget to follow the Visual Studio blog and the Visual Studio Toolbox show to be up on news and how-tos related to the IDE.

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