News

Amid Kids, Pets and Internet Blips, Dev Team Ships Visual Studio 2019 v16.6 Preview 3

Like the rest of us, the Visual Studio dev team is learning the new ropes involved with working from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, nevertheless shipping Visual Studio 2019 v16.6 Preview 3.

"Despite our challenges of learning how to work from home such as interruptions by kids, pets and internet blips, we continue to deliver new features to you," said Jacqueline Widdis, program manager on the Release Team, in a blog post today (April 16).

Here's a rundown of what's new:

  • Version control: This includes expanded Git functionality, in preview. Some highlights include:
    • When a developer clones a repository with one solution, the IDE will automatically load the solution after the clone completes.
    • The UI for committing and stashing gets an enhanced amend experience for commits.
    • The team answered feedback ("Git window does not display remote branches in branch dropdown") about branch management.
    • Coders can now create a new branch commit in their repository history.
    • The top-level Git menu received several new commands for improved keyboard access.
  • Visual Studio Terminal: A Fonts and Colors dialog customizes font faces and sizes.
    Fonts and Colors Option
    [Click on image for larger view.] Fonts and Colors Option (source: Microsoft).
  • Mobile Developer Tools: The team enhanced XAML Hot Reload functionality introduced in preview 2. Widdis said it's "now even faster and maintains more state on your page when you make a change. Your XAML change no longer makes the full-page refresh thanks to the Changes Only Reload setting in Tools > Options > Xamarin > Hot Reload. In Preview, this new reload method can be turned on or off at any time. If you chose to turn it on, you'll also get the new Live Visual Tree during debugging. Therefore, this lets you see what controls are on the page of your running app!"
  • Microsoft Fakes for .NET Core and SDK-Style Projects: The Microsoft Fakes mocking framework now supports .NET Core. The tool helps developers isolate tests by "mocking" certain code with stubs or shims, helping "untangle a test from your product code so it can focus on testing only what it is relevant in each test."
  • Azure Key Vault in the Packaging Wizard: "UWP developers can now sign their app packages with code signing certificates directly from Azure Key Vault in the packaging wizard."
  • The New WPF XAML Designer for .NET Framework Projects: This is now in early preview. "This brings the same designer and extensibility support available for WPF .NET Core developers to WPF .NET Framework."

Returning to the COVID-19 crisis that's on everyone's minds these day, Widdis concluded her post by offering best wishes: "I am reminded of a developer who reached out on LinkedIn. He shared how the release of new features made his time of social isolation bearable. Like many of us, he'd rather create through trying new things. In this spirit, we will continue to prioritize making our product more reliable while still capturing the innovative ideas and suggestions shared on Developer Community."

More details on all of the above, other new features and bug fixes are available in the release notes.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events