Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2022 IDE, a planned 64-bit upgrade to the company’s signature software development environment, is now available as a preview.
With the preview, which follows the company’s April announcement of Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft is looking to test and tune the new scalability of the platform, enabled by 64-bit support. The 64-bit conversion impacts every part of the IDE, Microsoft noted, thus making it bigger than previous Visual Studio previews.
Introduced June 17, the Visual Studio 2022 preview is downloadable from the Visual Studio website. Instructions are provided by Microsoft on how to report problems with the preview. Visual Studio 2022 previews can be installed side-by-side with earlier versions of the platform. They are available in Enterprise, Pro, and Community editions.
While most of the Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1 upgrades pertain to 64-bit support, the planned Preview 2 is set to begin a slate of improvements to features and performance. Plans call for empowering developers and teams with scale and performance, making application development faster and improving collaboration, diagnostics, and code assistance. UI and personalization also will get attention.
With the Visual Studio 2022 Preview 1, developers can try out an update to IntelliCode, Visual Studio’s AI-assisted development feature, for automatic code completion up to an entire line at a time. Cross-platform development is enabled by C# and the .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) framework. Preview 5 of .NET MAUI also was released on June 17, featuring animations and view transformations, porting of several UI components, and improvements to single-project templates.