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Visual Studio Dev Team Wraps 2023 with v17.9 Preview 2
The final 2023 effort from Microsoft's Visual Studio dev team is Visual Studio 2022 17.9 Preview 2, the second step on the long march to general availability.
Whereas last month's Preview 1 introduced new community-driven productivity gains, including GitHub Copilot functionality, the team today in an announcement called out improvements to the development experiences with C++ and .NET MAUI, the latter being the "evolution" of Xamarin.Forms with desktop app support. And, once again, the team gave thanks for community guidance.
"You'll find the '#include Diagnostics' for C++ more robust and the 'Live Property Explorer' for .NET MAUI now available, making your coding more intuitive and efficient, along with other new features," said the team's Maddy Montaquila, senior product manager for .NET MAUI. "These updates reflect our commitment to continuously improving Visual Studio in response to your feedback."
Here's' what's new in three focus areas: productivity, C++ game development and .NET/C#.
Productivity
Devs can go to Tools > Options > Text Editor and check the "Automatically surround selections when typing quotes or brackets" option in order to -- you guessed it -- surround a selection with bracket delimiters including "double quotes" and 'single quotes' and (parentheses). This means ta developer can select a chunk of code and then just type in ( for example to wrap the code in parentheses. Previously -- as in many other software programs -- the selected code would just have been replaced with the opening parens, as shown in this animated GIF:
[Click on image for larger, animated GIF view.] Auto Surround with Quotes or Brackets in Animated Action (source: Microsoft).
C++
Two things were highlighted here:
- #include Diagnostics: While Preview 1 introduced the ability to let developers visualize how many times each #include directive has been referenced in their code with "#include diagnostics references," the associated functionality was improved in Preview 2. Now the "#include diagnostics build time" feature enables devs to also see the compilation time of their #include directives once they have run Build Insights. It's disabled by default but is easily turned on.
- Remote Linux Unit Testing: The Developer Community feedback item for this is titled "CTest support for remote Linux targets." It complains that when switching to a remote (Linux) environment, the CMake->Tests menu option isn't available, making it painful to run a test suite on Linux from within Visual Studio. The team answered by enabling unit tests for remote Linux scenarios, which can be tried out in C++ projects targeting Linux on WSL or remote systems in the Test Explorer.
.NET/C#
This is where the .NET MAUI functionality comes in, specifically support for the Live Property Explorer tool that enables devs to inspect XAML properties during debugging, executed in conjunction with XAML Live Preview and Live Visual Tree. "With LPE, you can easily view and tweak the properties of your app controls at runtime, which is especially useful when you're looking to debug issues, optimize performance, or investigate where a property is defined in," Montaquila said.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.