Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Switches to 64bit, Coming End of Year
Microsoft has announced Visual Studio 2022. The software developer program will be 64bit and promises to be faster and more accessible than its predecessor. A preview will be released this summer, the release version will follow at the end of 2021.
Microsoft announced this in a blog post. The new version of Visual Studio will be faster, more accessible and more lightweight, the company says. For the first time, Visual Studio will be a 64-bit application, “with no 4GB limitation in the devenv.exe process,” Microsoft writes. By moving to 64bit, Microsoft believes it should be easier to open, edit, run and debug large, complex applications without running into memory problems. Developers can still develop 32bit applications in Visual Studio 2022.
The new version of Visual Studio will have a new interface, which should make it less complicated than the current version, according to Microsoft. There will be new icons, new themes and a new font, Cascadia Code. Visual Studio 2022 will also have more room to adjust the integrated development environment to your own taste, although Microsoft is not yet saying exactly what that will look like.
Visual Studio 2022 will also receive support for cloud applications with Azure, which should make it easier to work with repositories in Visual Studio. Also, the software will have full support for .NET 6, including .NET MAUI for developing cross-platform apps for Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS. Visual Studio is also getting a hot reload option for .NET, allowing developers to make changes to code without having to reboot.
It also gets full support for C++ with productivity tools and IntelliSense. In addition, support is built in for CMake, Linux and WSL to make it easier to develop cross-platform apps in C++ with Visual Studio.
Microsoft is adding more capabilities for collaborative project collaboration to Visual Studio 2022, including new support for Git and GitHub. Microsoft is also introducing Live Share, which includes integrated text chat to have conversations about project code without having to switch contexts. Live Share also brings the ability to schedule sessions for collaboration, where the same link can be used for recurring sessions, such as weekly collaboration appointments.
The Mac version of Visual Studio is also getting an update, with plans to move to “native macOS UI” with the aim of making the program work better on the Mac and allowing the software to take advantage of built-in macOS features. New menus should bring the Windows and Mac versions of Visual Studio closer together. The Mac version also gets the new Git experience, with a Git Changes tool window.