Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 arrives

Visual Studio 2022, a major upgrade that brings 64-bit performance to Microsoft’s flagship integrated development environment, is now available as a production release.

Officially unveiled November 8 and accessible from the product’s website, Visual Studio 2022 is positioned to help developers move from an idea to coding faster, emphasizing productivity and quality-of-life improvements.

Keys to Visual Studio 2022 include:

• With 64-bit support, Visual Studio 2022 can leverage modern hardware to scale to support larger and more complex projects. Also, Microsoft has focused on improving performance of common scenarios.
• IntelliCode, an AI-assisted coding companion, enables developers to type less and code more. The feature can complete entire lines of code.
• Hot Reload for .NET and C++ provides an opportunity to update running code and immediately see the results of changes.
• New tools improve inner loop productivity and debugging. Command-line details are featured, as well as a parent-child process tree view, and a “Select running window from the desktop” option in the “Attach to process” dialog.
• A new designer for Web Forms projects is powered by Web Live Preview.
• The Cascadia font and new icons are offered.
• Visual Basic refactorings help developers write more correct and efficient code. Also for Visual Basic, new capabilities such as subword navigation are intended to make coding smoother.
• Cross-platform testing on Linux is supported.

Concurrently with Visual Studio 2022, the .NET 6 software development platform also is available for download. Visual Studio 2022 is positioned to offer a low-friction upgrade experience, with no code changes required. Developers still can build 32-bit apps and all existing apps in the new IDE. Microsoft also is shipping the first preview of Visual Studio 2022 17.1. Regular updates to Visual Studio are promised, with fixes and new features.