News

Visual Studio 2022 Roadmap Published

• By David Ramel
• 05/24/2021

Microsoft published the roadmap for the next milestone release of its flagship IDE, Visual Studio 2022.

Developers got a sneak peek at Visual Studio 2022 last month with a blog post including the surprising announcement that it would be a 64-bit application, allowing access to much more memory. That was met with enthusiasm from hundreds of developers who sounded off on features that were revealed.

That 64-bit surprise, of course, is the lead item in the new Visual Studio 2022 Roadmap, published last week (May 20), highlighting work planned for the rest of 2021. The first VS 2022 preview is expected this summer.

"We're improving developer productivity by moving the main devenv.exe process from 32-bit to 64-bit," says the new documentation. "This will effectively eliminate out-of-memory errors, especially for large, complex solutions." Indeed, last month's announcement included a demo of the IDE open up a solution with some 1,600 projects and about 300,000 files:

Otherwise, the roadmap covers, in mostly general rather than specific terms, what's on tap in areas ranging from diagnostics to IntelliCode to setup/installation, addressing topics from C++ to .NET and container tools.

The roadmap reveals three key themes for VS 2022:

• Personal and Team productivity: we want to empower developers and teams with incredible scale and performance, a trusted and secure toolchain, and a more accessible, personalized environment.
• Modern Development: we are building the tools to develop modern apps faster.
• Constant Innovation: we are investing in improved collaboration, actionable diagnostics, and code assistance.

Following those themes in different areas, highlights of the documentation include:

• Accessibility-related options will be more discoverable, and audio cue availability is expanding.
• The Accessibility Insights Engine will be integrated to empower developers to build modern, accessible applications.
• More personalization options will be available, along with improved ability to sync settings across multiple machines.
• Icons, themes, and fonts will be updated "for a modern, updated experience."
• Breakpoints will be draggable, with the addition of dependent breakpoints and the ability to force Run.
• Analyzation tools will be improved for crash dumps, memory dumps, and memory pressure analysis.
• There will be cross-platform support for debugging C++ and .NET code on ARM64 devices.
• The Visual Studio 2022 editor will have a built-in spell-checker.
• Code readability will see new ways to navigate, such as multi-caret editing and "Camel Hump" navigation.
• Users of screen readers will enjoy better feedback on code problems.
• Essential extensions will be more reliable and secure.
• Development, migration, and publishing experience for extensions will be improved.
• IntelliCode will provide larger completions.
• Enterprises will be able to use multiple layout folders for updating a client instance, use multiple supported baselines, and move their installations between channels.
• Users will be able to roll back Visual Studio to a working environment after a failed update.
• Productivity will be improved via support for more complex Git workflows such as simultaneously activating multiple Git repositories.
• Developers will be able to stage individual lines or hunks of code and see improved diffs and details.
• GitHub and Azure DevOps integration will be boosted, bringing functionality closer to developer workflow.
• C++20 language features will be supported to simplify management of large code bases.
• Support for CMake, Linux, and WSL will be integrated to make it easier to create and debug cross-platform apps.
• Productivity will be improved with built-in code assistance.
• A full designer experience for Windows Forms with .NET 5 is in the works.
• The ability to diagnose containerized apps using the Containers tool window is planned.
• Web Tools will see improved dependency configuration, expanding Azure hosting options for publishing, and optimizing storage.
• XAML and Xamarin will get hot reload for better productivity, while developers will be empowered to write cross-platform applications with .NET 6 with the .NET MAUI initiative.

The roadmap documentation was published in advance of the Microsoft Build developer conference, starting tomorrow (May 25), during which more details on VS 2022 are sure to come.