Visual Studio 2022 Version 17.11 is Now Available, Next Version is in Preview

Microsoft just announced the back-to-back releases of two versions of Visual Studio: Version 17.11 is now available in stable and version 17.12 is available in an initial preview release that will ship in stable alongside .NET 9 in November. Speaking of which, Microsoft just released .NET 9 Preview 7 as well.

“We are thrilled to announce the General Availability (GA) of Visual Studio 2022 version 17.11,” Microsoft’s Mads Kristensen writes. “This release is a testament to our commitment to listening to you, our developer community. Every enhancement, every fix, and every new feature in this release has been shaped by your feedback. Whether you’re building web, desktop, cloud, or gaming applications, Visual Studio 2022 v17.11 is designed to make your development experience smoother, faster, and more intuitive.”

According to the release notes, Visual Studio 2022 17.11 is all about quality of life improvements, with fixes to a long list of customer-submitted support tickets spanning the IDE, GitHub Copilot, debugging and diagnostics, various workloads and languages, and even general productivity. It delivers a dozen or so bug fixes as well.

Moving on to Visual Studio 2022 version 17.12 Preview 1, it appears that this is the path forward for those–like me–targeting .NET 9.

“Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 Preview 1 focuses on providing fantastic developer experiences for working with .NET 9 projects and new AI productivity features, along with continues improvements all-around,” Mr. Kristensen writes. “Additionally, you’ll find updates to features around the IDE that make working with .NET and ASP.NET more delightful than ever. This update [also] brings new improvements to GitHub Copilot that are unique to Visual Studio.”

You can download Visual Studio 2022 17.12 Preview 1 from the Visual Studio website.

Finally, there’s .NET 9: Microsoft released its latest, and 7th, preview of .NET 9 last night, alongside various other .NET 6 and .NET 8 updates. This one includes updates to the .NET libraries, runtime, and SDK, C#, ASP.NET Core, and .NET MAUI. But nothing for WPF, which is what I’m still waiting on. Generally speaking, .NET 9 is focused on cloud-native and intelligent app development, and it will deliver “significant investments in performance, productivity, and security, as well as advancements across the platform,” Microsoft has said.

You can download .NET 9 Preview 7 from the .NET website.