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What Do Devs Want for VS 2022? The Top 10 Feature Requests
After Microsoft addressed a top developer feature request with this week's sneak peek at the upcoming 64-bit Visual Studio 2022, what else is in the works?
To find out, we checked out the Visual Studio top feature requests on the Developer Community feedback site, where Microsoft also collects bug reports and other problems.
[Click on image for larger view.] Top 10 Developer Community Visual Studio Feature Requests (source: Microsoft).
As measured by community votes, a "Visual Studio x64 implementation" was No. 6 on the list, just moved on April 19 (when VS 2022 was announced) from "Under Review" to "On Roadmap." The roadmap was last updated Jan. 28, 2021.
[Click on image for larger view.] 64-bit Moved to Roadmap (source: Microsoft).
That move, in a nearly hell-freezes-over moment, was greeted with comments like "Holy Guacamole!"
Other top-voted items (with 100-vote threshold) on the roadmap include:
Note that many requests were placed on the roadmap much earlier than the 64-bit item. Many date back to Oct. 8 when they were migrated over from the old UserVoice site. Some feature requests received thousands of votes on that old site, so the Developer Community votes don't necessarily reflect the total of all votes that were received. For example, the "Allow multiple Git repositories to be active at once" item listed above was migrated over with 1,984 UserVoice votes. There doesn't seem to be a way to show combined UserVoice and Developer Community votes, or when migrated UserVoice items were first published.
While those requests listed above are now on the roadmap, the top three vote getters are still under review:
- Color coded tabs in Visual Studio (970 votes, 191 comments)
[Click on image for larger view.] Color coded tabs in Visual Studio
(source: Microsoft).
- Visual Studio for Linux (771 votes, 155 comments)
[Click on image for larger view.] Visual Studio for Linux
(source: Microsoft).
- Show the active document in bold in Document Well (393 votes, 22 comments)
[Click on image for larger view.] Show the active document in bold in Document Well
(source: Microsoft).
An IDE running on Linux was also the topic of much discussion among more than 700 comments that were posted in reaction to the VS 2022 sneak peak.
As far as the top-rated color coded tabs item, the last comment was just added one week ago: "Two and a half years after it was raised, this feature is still 'Under Review'. What is taking so long?"
Remarkably, it seems to have been posted by someone from the Microsoft dev team.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.