We are happy to announce that Visual Studio 17.5 is now available. This release is packed with updates that will remove friction from your daily workflow and make it easier for you to stay in the zone while coding. Features like all-in-one search and intent-based suggestions help you move faster, while improved build and debug speeds ensure your IDE doesn’t slow you down.
For .NET and cloud developers, we focused on improving the inner-loop development experience. New .http/.rest files make it easier to test and iterate on your APIs directly in Visual Studio, while improved development tunnels streamline the setup and management of your webhooks. We’ve also made it easier than ever to deploy your ASP.NET applications in containers.
Game developers can now view modified base class properties in an Unreal Blueprint asset without leaving the IDE. Visual Studio has improved the cross-platform development experience with a new remote file explorer, Linux console output to the built-in terminal window, development container improvements, and more.
Beyond individuals, Visual Studio also has new features to better support development teams at scale, with exportable configuration files and a permanent update switch to ensure everyone on your team is working with the latest version of the tool.
IDE productivity and performance
Visual Studio’s new all-in-one search, intent-based suggestions, and debug visualization tools are designed to improve code navigation and code understanding. With a focus on productivity, this release not only brings new features but also reduces build and debug times, making your workflow faster and more efficient.
All-in-one search
All-in-one search provides users with a fast and easy way to find Visual Studio files, types, and members in your code. We’ve significantly improved the order and relevance of results in our code search while removing result limiting without sacrificing speed.
Code search now has a preview pane that supports code results for C# and C++! The preview is automatically displayed when you perform a search so you can see the context of the selected result. You can change the orientation of the panel or enable/disable it by selecting the panel icons at the top right of the window.
Enable All-in-One Search by going to Tools > Manage Preview Features > “New Visual Studio Search Environment (requires restart)”.
AI-powered, intent-based suggestions
Intent-based suggestions is a new feature that provides inline suggestions in your editor based on your recent changes. This feature uses machine learning algorithms to understand the pattern of repeated changes you try to make to your code and suggests the change directly in your stream, allowing you to code faster and more accurately. Give it a try and discover the power of intent-based suggestions in your development workflow today!
Debugger text viewer
We’ve improved the text viewer with additional tools and string editing options. You can now encode and decode URLs and Base64 JWTs more easily, while fully themed means the text display window matches the look of the rest of your IDE.
Faster .NET builds and debugger capabilities
We’ve significantly improved the performance of incremental builds by only building projects that have changed and ignoring unchanged projects. With Build Acceleration, you can reduce incremental build times for .NET SDK-like projects by up to 80%.
We’ve also significantly improved debugger performance by improving thread window response times. This window is essential for debugging today’s multithreaded applications. In this release, the threads window is automatically scaled to the number of threads, doubling response times compared to Visual Studio 17.4. We’ve also improved the speed of decompiling external sources by up to 10x, making debugging .NET modules much more efficient.
Improved experience with Razor and C#
To address feedback on Razor and C# productivity and performance, we focused on improving the Razor and C# experience with support for code actions in Razor files, including some useful shortcuts like remove tag, image in Encode Base64″ and “Insert Height/Width of Image”.
Much of the feedback we’ve received on editing with Razor and C# related to the Roslyn experience. We have prioritized improving performance when changing project configuration, accelerating code analysis detection, and improving typing experience to reduce UI lag.
Modern .NET and cloud development
API development for inner loops
Backend APIs and microservices play a crucial role in delivering modern web applications. But for many, API development remains a sore point. Effective development with APIs requires agility and the ability to iterate rapidly. We’re dedicated to making APIs easier to use throughout the inner-loop lifecycle, from coding and building to debugging and testing your apps.
Our first step towards better and faster API development is adding .http/.rest files in ASP.NET Core projects along with a built-in HTTP client. These files serve as concise definitions for your API endpoints, allowing you to “run” your APIs and manipulate various REST calls to iterate through parameters and display results in an structured way, all from within Visual Studio.
These .http/.rest files are not intended to replace integration and unit tests. Rather, they provide a new way to quickly iterate through API development, as well as a common place to monitor the APIs your application can use and examine the required I/O during development.
This is just the first step in improving the quality of life for developers working with microservices in Visual Studio – stay tuned for future features in upcoming releases!
Improved configuration and management of dev tunnels
Of course, APIs are just one way for modern applications to interact with each other. Webhooks are also essential for the automatic flow of information between different applications. Development tunnels play a crucial role in setting up webhooks during inner-loop processes, as they allow utilities to be piped to code hosted locally on your machine. We’ve made setting up Visual Studio development funnels easier by giving you more control over how they’re set up and built.
This version makes it easier to manage and switch between your development tunnels and allows you to specify which one you want to use in a given debugging session. Both of these features allow .NET API developers to achieve significant productivity gains inside the inner loop, and we welcome your feedback on them.
Containers and Azure
For .NET developers working on web applications and APIs, fast and easy container management is key to increasing productivity and efficiency. Visual Studio already has great support for deployment to services like Azure App Service and Azure Functions, but we want to extend that simplicity to container-based services like Azure Container Apps.
This release takes a big step forward by enabling you to deploy your ASP.NET Core app to Azure Container Apps in just a few steps. Instead of relying on additional files to define your container contents and build steps, you can now target Azure Container Apps directly from the publish window and use a pre-provisioned resource or ask VS to help you build:
After creating your resource, you can take advantage of the new capabilities of the .NET 7 SDK to build the container image directly with the SDK without any additional knowledge or files. It’s a quick and easy way to move your code to the cloud using existing and familiar tools and workflows.
Of course, with our Azure publishing capabilities, you can also choose how to deploy by selecting the requirement or asking VS to create a GitHub Actions starter workflow if your app is in a GitHub repository.
accessibility test
Visual Studio now has a built-in accessibility checker that detects many common accessibility issues for XAML-based desktop applications. The Accessibility Checker uses the same Axis Windows engine as Accessibility Insights, which is the same accessibility testing tool that the Visual Studio team uses for its own accessibility tests. Accessibility Checker supports WPF, UWP, WinUI and MAUI (via WinUI). To access the Accessibility Checker, ensure that the XAML Hot Reload feature is enabled on the options page, and then click the Scan for Accessibility Issues button on the XAML Live Visual Tree toolbar.
When you click the “Accessibility Issues” button, the Axis Windows engine searches for accessibility issues in the running application and displays them in the Accessibility Checker window. This window shows the automation ID, rule, description and a brief explanation of how to fix the issue for each item detected by the Axis Windows engine.
Modern C++ and game development
We’ve added several new productivity improvements for C++ developers, whether working on games, cross-platform or embedded apps, including a UE Asset Inspector in Visual Studio, Hot Reload support for CMake projects, IntelliSense improvements for macro extensions, and more .
Blueprint and Asset Inspector references for Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine game developers can now view blueprint references and related assets directly in Visual Studio. To view the blueprint references, click the CodeLens indices now displayed over C++ features, classes, and properties. From there you can click the CodeLens Blueprint hint and select a benchmark to open the Asset Inspector.
Macro expansion improvements
We’ve also made several improvements to IntelliSense’s macro expansion to provide more efficient, attractive, and easier-to-read macro expansions in tooltips. Not only have we added a recursive extension in more contexts, you can now copy the extension to the clipboard or extend the macro inline with options in the IntelliSense pop-up window. In addition, expansion macros now have a formatted display and a single-spec font in the tooltip.
Atoms of C11
Users will be pleased to know that we have extended the functionality of our standard library to include C11 Atomics in MSVC. Initial support is for lockless Atomic only and can be found under the /experimental:c11atomics flag in /std:c11 mode or higher.
Native clang tools for Arm64
While Visual Studio 17.4 introduced Arm64 support, we extended Arm64 capabilities with native Arm64 clang tools in our LLVM workload, allowing for native compilation on Arm64 machines.
Cross-platform and embedded development in C++
For cross-platform and embedded developers, we’ve added several new features to streamline your workflows beyond Windows.
Linux improvements
We moved the Linux console to the integrated terminal to make it easier to interact with the remote Linux machine. The built-in console window allows you to provide input and view console output.
If you use a development container to develop applications, you can now run them on remote computers. We also added the ability to open an interactive shell inside the container running in the built-in terminal.
New CMake features
With this release of Visual Studio, we’ve also added several new CMake features to speed up build workflows. You can now build and test multiple CMake targets at once from the CMake Targets view in Solution Explorer. We’ve also enabled Hot Reload for CMake projects and added support for the latest CMakePresets.json files, making it easier to share settings across your development and CI environments while maintaining consistency.
Simultaneous monitoring of the serial interface
Embedded developers who have more than one serial device or TCP connection with SWO traces will be pleased to know that they can now have more than one serial port monitor open at the same time.
corporate governance
Deploying an application across a large enterprise presents unique challenges. Visual Studio has improved the experience of creating and managing offline page layouts for Visual Studio deployment. We’ve also made it easier for developers to choose and control when updates are applied to their local computer.
Customize a layout using a .config file
It is now possible to use an exported configuration file to configure the content of an offline model. This feature has been one of the most popular suggestions from the developer community and requires the latest Visual Studio installer, which ships with Visual Studio 17.5. To use this feature, first export a Visual Studio configuration file that you want to replicate in your layout, then run the following command:
vs_enterprise.exe –layout c:\layout –config c:\my.vsconfig –useLatestInstaller This functionality extends to Visual Studio 2017 provided you pass the required –useLatestInstaller parameter. It is also possible to add components to an existing layout. If you have already created an overview layout that contains a workload, you can add the configuration of additional components and workloads to that layout using exactly the same syntax as above.
Winget integration
Visual Studio 2022 and 2019 are now supported and available in Winget, the Windows package management tool. Going forward, all Visual Studio updates will now be automatically available on Winget as part of our release process.
By default, Winget only installs the basic Visual Studio workload. However, you can take advantage of winget’s –override switch, as well as our new –config switch, and use winget to do a custom install. For example :
winget install –id Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.Community –override “–passive –config c:\my.vsconfig” Please note that during the change of ownership of the winget repository we updated the existing directory structure to accommodate it to better reflect how we ship and maintain Visual Studio. This means that if you have scripts or commands that depend on the old Winget directory structure or package identification, you may need to do a one-time fix to match our changes.
Always update close
It is now possible to configure Visual Studio to automatically apply updates on exit. This setting can be configured per instance of Visual Studio. For example, you can configure your previews to check for updates when you close the preview, but your normal production Visual Studio instance can still be updated if necessary. You can find this option in the Tools > Options > Product Updates dialog.
Accessibility Feature – Added sounds in installer!
We’re constantly improving the Visual Studio customization experience to help you be more productive. Many of you are probably using the recently added beeps in the Visual Studio editor, and now we’ve added beeps in the installer! The audio signal notifies the user that the operation in the installer is complete or that an error has occurred by playing a sound. This includes installing, updating, modifying and many other operations performed by the installer or any error dialog when attempting the requested operation. This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it by following the instructions outlined here: Disable sounds in installer – Visual Studio feedback.
Source: microsoft
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See also:
Visual Studio 2022 17.5 Preview 3 brings bracket pair coloring for C++ and improvements when debugging external sources
Visual Studio 2022 17.4 is generally available, adding native Arm64 support and the ability to revert to your previously installed version of VS