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Microsoft Spotlights .NET 9, Cloud in First Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 Preview
With Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 shipping this week, the first preview of the next edition sees Microsoft emphasizing support for the coming .NET 9 and cloud development with Aspire.
".NET 9 elevates cloud-native and intelligent app development, focusing on productivity enhancements, streamlined deployments, and accelerated AI integration, ensuring superior performance for developers across various applications," said Mads Kristensen, principal product manager for the IDE. "And Visual Studio 17.12 fully supports .NET 9 development making it easy for you to take full advantage of all the improvements it has to offer." The post highlights Aspire for cloud development in a subheading, but no further mention is made of that product, which the company has been pushing hard.
AI of course was also front and center, with Kristensen promising "new improvements to GitHub Copilot that are unique to Visual Studio," but neither his post nor the accompanying release notes detail what those improvements are, or even mention Copilot. He did mention "providing more context from the IDE," and Microsoft has been broadening the sources from which Copilot draws its suggestions, for Enterprise subscribers of the tool.
The release notes indicate Productivity received the most attention in this preview, with updates including:
- Copy from the Error List: Copying an error from the Error List now copies just the description instead of the entire row to the clipboard.
- Go to line anywhere in Code Search: In Code Search, you can now navigate to a specific line in the current document or other specified document.
[Click on image for larger view.] Go To Line Anywhere (source: Microsoft).
- Dock the Code Search window: You can now freely position the Code Search window with capabilities like docking and auto-hiding.
- Manage file renaming with Git: Get peace of mind when renaming files with a new notification.
- Create internal GitHub repos: Visual Studio now supports creating internal repos and includes guidance for each type of repository to give you more confidence when starting a new project.
On the web-dev side of things, one benefit of the .NET 9 support is an improved debugging experience for Blazor WebAssembly, the client-side component of Blazor.
The improved debugging experience for Blazor WebAssembly apps targeting .NET 9 or later includes:
- Data types shown in the debugger now match the expected .NET data types.
- Type members and member visibility use expected icons.
- The displayed call stack is cleaned up to only shows the .NET call stack and correctly honors the Just My Code setting.
- The modules window is now supported.
- Expression evaluation support in the Immediate window and for watches and conditional breakpoints is expanded and improved.
Other tweaks relate to security warnings in the IDE department, enhanced WinUI component search in the Desktop department, and assorted Web items ranging from HTTP file support for Request Variables to Inlay Hints support for more languages.
Kristensen warned the v17.12 download shouldn't be used in production environments and that some extensions or workloads may not be compatible.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.