Microsoft releases first public preview of Visual Studio 2022

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by Kareem Anderson 

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Microsoft has just announced that its Visual Studio 2022 preview is up for developer testing ahead of its planned summer release this year.

In a lengthy and feature teasing posted to the Visual Studio blog, developers can read about the new 64-bit nature of VS 2022, updated icons, new personalization options, improvements to .NET cross-platform development UIs, real-time collaboration support, and improved code search, just to list a few.

The next major release of Visual Studio will be faster, more approachable, and more lightweight, designed for both learners and those building industrial-scale solutions. For the first time ever, Visual Studio will be 64-bit. The user experience will feel cleaner, intelligent, and action-oriented.

Today’s release boasts a ton of features developers have been belaboring about for some time.

Regarding some of the specifics, developers can start playing with the scalable memory main devenv.exe process with the new 64-bit support.

Visual Studio 64-bit

There are also some cosmetic changes coming to VS 2022 that should help modernize the overall UI and reduce some redundant visuals as well as making things more accessible for more developers.

  • 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! https://aka.ms/CascadiaCode)
  • Refreshed and improved product themes.
  • Integration with Accessibility Insights to detect accessibility issues early on—before they get to your end-users.

Visual Studio Icon Refresh

To speed up the development process, VS 2022 is also bringing support for .NET6, .NET MAUI, and ASP.NET Blazor, C++20 tooling as well as some pre-built GitHub workflows.

Debugging is also getting some attention with improvements to core debugger with flame charts in the profiler allowing developers to search through code from various places.

Perhaps, the most interesting tools coming with VS 2022 are Live Share and real-time collaboration. Developers can now basically schedule development times to work with others on code and mark them as a reoccurring event with noted instruction sets. However, for the lone coder there are asynchronous collaborative tools baked in as well as improvements to the AI IntelliCode engine to catch potential code issues in real-time so you developers can hand over their portion of code quickly.

Mac developers also get a nod in VS 2022 with a more modern-looking IDE visual update to the platform that Microsoft also claims does a better job of taking advantage of “built-in macOS accessibility features.” Unfortunately, it appears the macOS redesign will be a piecemeal affair as Microsoft plans to roll out visual upgrades gradually for now.

Visit the Visual Studio blog, to read up on the new features coming to the public preview today.

Kareem Anderson

Kareem Anderson Shield

Networking & Security Specialist

Kareem is a journalist from the bay area, now living in Florida. His passion for technology and content creation drives are unmatched, driving him to create well-researched articles and incredible YouTube videos. He is always on the lookout for everything new about Microsoft, focusing on making easy-to-understand content and breaking down complex topics related to networking, Azure, cloud computing, and security.