Microsoft Launches Visual Studio 2019 With Improved Start Experience, Search, Debugging

Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2019 is launching today. The company finally announced that the latest version of Visual Studio is now generally available, which first previewed back in December of last year.

With Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft is looking to improve the productivity of developers. The IDE now comes with a new start experience that makes it really easy to clone an existing GitHub (or Git) repo), start working on your existing projects, to create a new project locally. The updated start experience comes with a new interface for creating new projects from templates, which makes it easy to find exactly what you are looking for.

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Microsoft is also launching Visual Studio 2019 for Mac today.

Visual Studio 2019 also comes with a completely revamped search experience. The search bar on the IDE is now accessible with a quick Ctrl+Q shortcut, and once you access the search bar you will now get search results for shortcuts, commands, settings, and more. The search bar also now works around your silly spelling mistakes, so you will now get the right search results even if there’s a typo on your query. Microsoft says the search feature’s performance has also been improved, so you will now get faster results, too.

Visual Studio 2019 introduces improved code navigation and a new document health indicator that helps you analyse the quality of your codebase. The feature also comes with a new code cleanup functionality that will help you easily tackle some of these problems identified by the document health indicator, with Visual Studio offering you granular control over exactly what to clean up.

And last but not least, the debugging experience of the IDE is being improved with faster stepping performance, and new searching abilities for the Autos, Locals, and Watch debug windows. The update also improves Visual Studio’s AI-assisted code completion feature IntelliCode to work better with your team’s codebases, and share the exact intelligence across your entire team.

Visual Studio 2019 also integrates Live Share by default into the code editor — more on that here.

To sum up, Visual Studio 2019 is a major upgrade for Microsoft’s IDE. The upgrades here aren’t anything game-changing, but they are important updates that will most certainly contribute to a better programming experience for developers that rely on Visual Studio every day.

You can download Visual Studio 2019 here.

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Conversation 6 comments

  • Thomas Parkison

    02 April, 2019 - 12:40 pm

    <p>I just upgrade to the new version and so far so good. I've only been in the new version for a couple of minutes but I do like the changes.</p>

  • jimchamplin

    Premium Member
    02 April, 2019 - 5:52 pm

    <p>Will an upgrade be offered through the VS 2017 Installer?</p>

    • christian.hvid

      02 April, 2019 - 5:59 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#417771">In reply to jimchamplin:</a></em></blockquote><p>When I checked a couple of hours ago, only the preview was offered through the installer. I suggest you follow the download link instead (installing the RTM version of VS2019 will update the installer as well).</p>

    • lvthunder

      Premium Member
      02 April, 2019 - 7:40 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#417771">In reply to jimchamplin:</a></em></blockquote><p>When I was in VS2017 I got the yellow flag that said 2019 was available. There was a update to VS2017 as well today. When I installed VS2019 it installed a new VS Installer that takes care of both 2017 and 2019.</p>

      • wright_is

        Premium Member
        03 April, 2019 - 2:43 am

        <blockquote><em><a href="#417803">In reply to lvthunder:</a></em></blockquote><p>Same here.</p>

  • dontbe evil

    03 April, 2019 - 8:16 am

    <p>the best IDE ever, now even lighter and faster &lt;3</p>

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