Microsoft today announced that Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 is now available, and there’s a native Arm64 version for the first time.
“This will be the first version of Visual Studio that will natively support building and debugging Arm64 apps on Arm-based processors,” Microsoft’s Mark Downie writes. “Our key goal with this preview is to introduce and stabilize the most popular workloads used by developers who are building apps that run on Arm64, and to gather feedback from the community to help us prioritize additional experiences and workloads as we work toward General Availability (GA) later this year.”
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Microsoft announced that it would deliver an Arm64 native version of Visual Studio—as well as Arm versions of .NET, the .NET Framework, and C++—at Build 2022 earlier this month. And even this first build “significantly reduces the dependence on x64 emulation,” Downie notes, adding that it supports three workloads: desktop development with C++, .NET desktop development (Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation) using both .NET Framework and modern .NET, and network and web development. These workloads will be generally available by the end of 2022, Microsoft says.
There is a single installer for Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2, so it will correctly detect your PC’s system architecture and install the right version.