Microsoft has made a version 17.0 release candidate and Preview 5 of the newly 64-bit IDE available with a go-live license for production use. Credit: Metamorworks / Getty Images Microsoft’s 64-bit Visual Studio 2022 IDE will officially be launched on November 8, the company said. The company also announced the immediate availability of a release candidate and a fifth preview of the IDE. Both the release candidate and the upcoming general availability version, designated Visual Studio 2022 version 17.0, come with a go-live license for production use. To try out the latest features of Visual Studio 2022, developers should use Preview 5. Visual Studio 2022 will be 64-bit software, no longer limited to roughly 4 GB of memory in the main devenv.exe process, making memory concerns a thing of the past. In addition, the new IDE is intended to be more approachable and lightweight. With the release candidate, developers can build production-ready apps and prepare for general availability of Visual Studio 2022. Capabilities highlighted in Preview 5 include improved support for edits with Hot Reload in test runs and Xcode support. There also is a fix to a bug where Project Overview pages and panels in Diagnostic Tools and the Performance Profiler could appear too zoomed in with some multiple monitor setups. Visual Studio users with a license for the Enterprise or Professional editions can update to Preview 5 or the release candidate and sign in with their subscription user account. The release candidate and Preview 5 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2019. The release candidate and Preview 5 follow Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4, released September 14, as well as Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3, which was released August 10, and Visual Studio 2022 Preview 3.1, released August 16. Prior to that, Preview 2 was published on July 14 while Preview 1 arrived on June 17. Development ToolsTechnology IndustrySoftware DevelopmentMicrosoft .NET