Microsoft Releases Visual Studio 2022 17.5

Microsoft has announced the latest version of its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) with numerous improvements.

“We’re excited to announce that Visual Studio 17.5 is now generally available,” Microsoft’s Anthony Cangialosi announced. “This release is full of updates that take the friction out of your daily workflows making it easier for you to stay in the zone while you code. Features like all-in-one search and intent-based suggestions help you move faster, while improved build and debug speeds ensure your IDE won’t slow you down.”

Some of the key improvements include:

All-In-One Search. This feature helps Visual Studio users find files, types, and members in their code and it uses a Preview Panel with code results for both C# and C++.

AI-powered suggestions. A new Intent-Based Suggestions feature provides in-line suggestions in the editor based on recent changes. It uses Machine Learning algorithms to understand the structure of repeated coding edits you’re making to suggest changes right in the editor.

Faster .NET builds and debugging. A new Build Acceleration feature reduces incremental build time on .NET projects by up to 80 percent. And the debugger is up to twice as fast now thanks to improvements to the threads window.

Inner-loop development improvements. For those creating back-end APIs and microservices, Visual Studio offers improvements to the inner-loop lifecycle—from coding and building to debugging and testing—with the addition of .http/.rest files in ASP.NET Core projects, and an integrated HTTP client. Now, developers can “run” APIs and manipulate REST calls to iterate within parameters and see the outputs in a structured way, from within Visual Studio.

Accessibility Checker. A new integrated Accessibility Checker that’s based on the accessibility testing tool the Visual Studio team uses for its own accessibility testing detects many common accessibility issues for XAML-based desktop applications. It supports WPF, UWP, WinUI, and MAUI (WinUI).

Native Arm64 Clang toolset. Building on the native Arm64 support from the last release, Visual Studio now includes a native Arm64 Clang toolset in its LLVM workload, enabling native compilation on Arm64 machines.

Winget integration. While previous Visual Studio 2022 and 2019 versions could be installed with a core workload via the winget command line tool, going forward all Visual Studio updates will be available on winget and support customized installs so developers can pick the workloads they need at initial install time.  You can learn more here.

Always update on close. A new option lets you (finally) configure Visual Studio to automatically apply updates when it closes.

There’s a lot more, but you can check out the original post for the full list of improvements. You can download Visual Studio 2022 17.5 from the Visual Studio website, but if you’re already using the product, you’ll be prompted to upgrade.