Microsoft has announced the general availability of Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. This major version of one of the most popular development environments has been released after a gap of two years, during which the last major release -- Visual Studio 2017 -- received multiple incremental fixes and feature upgrades. Microsoft had launched the first preview of Visual Studio 2019 at the Microsoft Connect(); 2018 event in December 2018. The new release includes a couple of highly anticipated features - IntelliCode and Live Share.
IntelliCode, available as an extension, is a set of AI-assisted capabilities to enhance developer productivity with features such as contextual IntelliSense, code formatting and style rule inference. According to the docs, it “trains across 2,000 open-source projects on GitHub—each with over 100 stars—to generate its recommendations.” IntelliCode extensions are available for C++, C# and XAML in Visual Studio.
Live Share, which is installed by default in Visual Studio 2019, is a real-time collaborative environment which allows teammates to edit and debug together without them needing to clone a repo or setup another environment. In his blog post announcing general availability of Live Share with Visual Studio 2019, Jon Chu, program manager, Visual Studio Live Share, notes that Live Share is “applicable in a wide variety of use cases. It can be used while pair programming, conducting code reviews, giving lectures and presenting to students and colleagues, or even mob programming during hackathons.”
The new release comes with a number of improvements over Visual Studio 2017. John Montgomery, corporate vice president, Visual Studio, in a blog post announcing the release states that the new start window experience, “helps you get into your code more quickly by making it simpler to clone a Git repo or to open an existing project or folder.” Visual Studio 2019 also comes with a new search experience which enables the developers to find anything in Visual Studio, including settings, command, tool windows, etc., and also supports fuzzy string searching.
Montgomery notes that “Visual Studio 2019 improves code navigation and adds many refactorings, as well as a document health indicator and one-click code clean-up to apply multiple refactoring rules. There are also improvements to the debugging experience, including data breakpoints for .NET Core apps that help you break only on value changes you’re looking for.”
VS 2019 for Mac includes a new C# editor, a new start window for better navigation, the ability to launch multiple instances of the IDE, support for the Unity debugger, and overall performance, reliability, and accessibility improvements, according to a blog post by Unni Ravindranathan, principal group program manager, Visual Studio for Mac.
Based on community feedback, just within a week after the release, an update has already been shipped, which, amongst some bug fixes, provides developers an option to select UWP while creating a new Xamarin.Forms project.
Microsoft has partnered with Pluralsight and LinkedIn Learning to enable developers to jump-start their journey with Visual Studio 2019. Pluralsight has a free course available until April 22nd, 2019, while LinkedIn Learning has a course that is free until May 2nd, and this covers the new features and improved functionality.
For a more comprehensive coverage of the additions and improvements, the docs can be found on the Microsoft site, alongside the release notes for Windows and Mac. To learn about the expected features to be shipped in the near future, please visit the Visual Studio Roadmap. In case of any questions, there is the Visual Studio developer Community.
