News

Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 Ships 'Shaped by Your Feedback' (and AI)

• By David Ramel
• 08/14/2024

Microsoft's Mads Kristensen heavily emphasized the community contributions that helped the dev team ship Visual Studio 2022 version 17.11, which includes new features, improvements and fixes across the board spawned from the ideas of users.

The principal program manager for Visual Studio, who is always soliciting feedback from developers about new features and incorporating it into extensions whose functionality often gets baked in to the flagship IDE, took pains to thank those who responded or provided input on their own.

"This release is a testament to our commitment to listening to you, our developer community," he said in announcing the new release this week. "Every enhancement, every fix, and every new feature in this release has been shaped by your feedback. Whether you're building web, desktop, cloud, or gaming applications, Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 is designed to make your development experience smoother, faster, and more intuitive."

It does that with a host of changes affecting debugging/diagnostics, web/gaming tools, IDE/workflow enhancements and improvements to GitHub Copilot AI.

The latter is probably the hottest area of .NET-centric development right now, and Kristensen highlighted the new features in that "indispensable tool for many developers."

Thanks to user input, he said, Copilot now offers:

• AI-Generated Breakpoint Expressions: Automatically suggest breakpoints based on your code, helping you debug more efficiently.
• Understand Your Symbols: Improved symbol recognition to ensure you get the most accurate suggestions.
• Refined Suggestions: More precise and context-aware code completions, reducing the need for manual edits.
• GitHub Copilot is even more secure: GitHub Copilot Business customers to prevent specified files or repositories from being used to inform code completion suggestions made by GitHub Copilot.

Most of this stuff has already been revealed in a series of previews that began in May with an emphasis on "quality of life" improvements, followed by a focus on AI in subsequent previews (see "Copilot AI Gets Smarter, More Secure in Visual Studio Previews").

At that time, for example, the "Understand Your Symbols" feature listed above was detailed:

"The tool helps devs understand symbols at different invocations without a code base, being now integrated into the tooltip on hover over symbols to provide AI-generated summaries of the selected symbol. This animated GIF, for example, shows a dev hovering over a symbol to get a summary of the symbol's definition and usage and then asking the tool to 'tell me more' to see generated documentation for the selected symbol:"

Here's a summary of what else is new.

The Productivity Enhancements section of the Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 announcement highlights several key improvements aimed at boosting developer efficiency.

These enhancements include improved search functionality that allows developers to quickly locate specific code within large projects, streamlining the workflow. Additionally, the code review process has been refined to make it easier to identify issues and collaborate effectively with team members. The process of creating pull requests has also been further refined, ensuring a smoother experience. Lastly, familiar keyboard shortcuts from other widely-used IDEs have been integrated to make the transition easier for users.

Here's a graphic illustrating improved pull request comments integration:

In Debugging & Diagnostics, Microsoft focused on enhancing debugging efficiency with several key updates driven by user feedback. These include better handling and diagnostics for asynchronous code, making it easier to fix async exceptions. Profiling tools have been enhanced to allow for more effective performance analysis, even with external code. Support and optimizations for Arm64 have been expanded, ensuring smoother debugging on a wider range of devices. A preview of the improved debugging experience for Blazor WebAssembly apps targeting .NET 9 or later is also included. Additionally, the IEnumerable visualizer now features an editable expression capability, allowing direct editing and visualization of LINQ expressions within the Visual Studio debugger.

In IDE & Workflow Enhancements, the team introduced several updates aimed at making the development environment more intuitive and responsive. The component installation process has been streamlined to ensure that developers can easily access and install the necessary tools. New features have been added to keep the development environment secure and up-to-date, emphasizing both cutting-edge functionality and stability. The Teams Toolkit now includes new app templates, enhancing the development experience for Microsoft Teams applications. Additionally, user authentication has been improved with Visual Studio adopting the Windows authentication broker (WAM) as the default mechanism, providing a more seamless and secure authentication process.

In Web & Gaming Development Tools, developers can now manage NPM dependencies more seamlessly within Visual Studio through direct integration with the Solution Explorer, streamlining the process. The Endpoints Explorer has been enhanced to dynamically discover Web API routes at runtime, making it easier to work with complex web applications. For game developers, especially those using Unreal Engine, the process of managing class templates has been simplified, streamlining the development workflow and saving time.

In .NET & C++ Development, the Resource Explorer has been revamped to offer a more powerful and intuitive resource management tool for .NET developers. For C++ developers, support for debugging CMake projects on Linux has been expanded, facilitating cross-platform development. Additionally, various "quality of life" improvements (as mentioned, a main focus in the first preview) have been added to C++ Build Insights, enhancing the overall development workflow.

"We heard you -- loud and clear," Kristensen said. "From the most upvoted issues on our Developer Community Forum to the suggestions that came through in our feedback channels, this release is a direct response to your needs and priorities."

He also noted that with this release, Microsoft improved accompanying release notes by organizing feature enhancements into categories, making it simpler for devs to identify what's new and relevant. Each enhancement is linked back to the original feedback that inspired it, highlighting how user input has directly influenced the update. This approach underscores Microsoft's commitment to transparency and collaboration, ensuring that Visual Studio updates align with the needs and priorities of the developer community, he said.

And, of course, more feedback was encouraged via the Developer Community site, the report a problem feature in the IDE.

"As always, we appreciate the time you've spent reporting issues and hope you continue to give us feedback on how we're doing and what we can improve," concluded Kristensen.