Visual Studio 2022 Roadmap

Visual Studio continues to be a comprehensive IDE, investing in AI to boost development, enhancing .NET cloud-native app development, leading in C++ and game development tools, and improving fundamental development processes. We're rolling out new features and productivity enhancements designed to make software development faster and more efficient, ensuring developers have the right tools for any project.

This roadmap describes our vision for major work in Visual Studio for the upcoming year and has these key themes:

• AI with Copilot brings a new wave of features and productivity with unmatched potential. Visual Studio is uniquely positioned to support best-in-class opportunities for developers and businesses with Copilot.
• .NET Aspire is designed to improve the experience of building .NET cloud-native apps, and Visual Studio is the premier developer tool for that.
• C++ game development is growing and Visual Studio is the gold standard of tools for modern game developers.
• Fundamentals are feature sets around existing workloads important to many customers. It also includes productivity enhancements to all inner-loop developer scenarios.

Our mission is to drive success for our customers and partners by creating the most lovable developer experience for .NET and C++ developers, and this roadmap reflects that.

AI with Copilot

The innovation around AI is accelerating and Visual Studio is at the forefront with several features in the works.

When we update existing features with AI, we’re able to add a whole new layer to the developer experience. As is often said, one of the hardest things in computer science is naming things, but with the updated AI renaming feature, this will be easy. The reason naming is hard is because it is important to get right. Developers spend significantly more time reading code than writing code, and naming is key to understanding a code base.

The same is true for code reviews and understanding the commit history. By letting AI analyze the changes you’ve made and suggest a relevant and detailed git commit message and pull request description, you avoid wasting a lot of time reading your code and its history.

Debugging is another key scenario that’s crucial to the success of any project. Copilot will be able to assist with error lookups, set conditional breakpoints and tracepoints, and analyze performance insights to make your app more reliable and performant.

When unit tests fail, determining how to get them passing again is tricky. Is it the code change you just made, or is there a problem with the unit test? Copilot will be able to assist with explaining why the test failed and suggesting what you can do to get back to a clean set of passing unit tests.

.NET and Aspire

We’re continuing to improve the cloud-native development experience we introduced with .NET Aspire by bringing more features and integration into Visual Studio and the .NET Aspire dashboard. With our upcoming preview release, we’ve started a new direction in making it easier for developers to publish multi-node apps to Azure Container Apps in one gesture. Visual Studio’s right-click-publishing is taking a dependency on the Azure Developer CLI for Aspire-to-Container Apps publishing, showing a great partnership that will enable developers to publish larger apps easier, with more reproducible outcome.

This partnership will also solve the problem of enabling developers to connect their code running on a local developer machine to in-cloud resources. This Clone -> Provision -> Debug -> Deploy paradigm is never more prevalent than with new OpenAI initiatives; to use Azure OpenAI one must first provision an Azure OpenAI resource and configure their app to talk to it. To enable these scenarios, Web Tools and AZD teams are deepening their partnership and investigating how AZD can solve the “at-dev-time" resource-provisioning question and lead to exciting opportunities with Visual Studio Connected Services. We’d like to lead in the direction of deeper dependency on AZD’s power for provisioning and deploying both in a developer environment and in a CI/CD environment, so .NET Aspire developers’ paths to Azure are friction-free.

C++ and game development

We are continuing to focus on improvements for all C++ developers around language conformance, productivity enhancements, diagnostics, and especially safety. Cross platform and game developer workloads will continue to be an area of focus, including bringing the Unreal Engine project support to GA. We are also working on introducing innovative new capabilities in Copilot for C++ developers.

Fundamentals

At the heart of Visual Studio is the developer experience with all its power, productivity, and customizations. Innovations in the inner loop remain a top priority and Visual Studio delivers key features for developers and enterprises alike.

Git tooling

We stay committed to providing a comprehensive git integration for all repositories, but for GitHub and Azure DevOps (ADO) in particular.

It will be easier than ever to create pull requests directly from within Visual Studio with new, updated experience. You will even be able to view and address comments directly in the code and even reference GitHub issues and link ADO work items with the pull request directly.

And with the AI generated commit message and pull request description, you will save a lot of time and increase readability and searchability of your code changes.

Debugger and profiler updates

We are committed to providing a more reliable and faster debugging experience across all platforms. Additionally, we are focusing on implementing productivity improvements in Debug Visualizers and Memory Analysis. Moving forward, we will continue to fine-tune support for debugging external sources, debugging Unreal Projects, and handling cross-platform debugging scenarios.

In terms of profiling, we are continuing to streamline benchmark .NET scenarios and integrate them with Git pipelines for a more productive development experience.

Finally, by prioritizing the enhancement of the AI-powered inner-loop experience to expedite root issue identification, we plan to make the debugging experience much simpler and smoother.

Testing

A new version of IntelliTest is currently in preview and we are committed to addressing the feedback from this preview and releasing this new version of IntelliTest that provides support for tests targeting .NET Core and x64 devices.

We're investing in the experience around how to quickly recover from failed tests.

To start, we're adding Explain with Copilot for all failed tests. Then follow up with Debug with Copilot for failed tests. These are two examples where AI can assist the developer in quickly identifying the root cause of a failed test and provide a fix.

On top of that, wer're improving MSTest all-around for all developers - not just the ones using Visual Studio.

Desktop and web development

On the road ahead for WinForms support in Visual Studio, we’ll continue to focus on the quality and performance of the designers.

The Web Tools team focuses on improving the web development end-to-end experiences when using Visual Studio, focusing on API development inner loop productivity. We are prioritizing Cloud Native scenarios with ASP.NET Core today.

We are also continuing to improve Hot Reload efficiency, aiming to increase reliability in the speed at which edits are applied, but also improving the type of edits that can be reloaded automatically in a Hot Reload session.

We are listening to your Razor feedback! Improvements in performance, completions, and general reliability of the Razor editing experiences is an area we continue to focus on each release. Please continue to provide feedback on scenarios where Razor editing does not meet your expectations.

Productivity

All-in-one Code Search text support is available as a preview feature, where file and symbol search results will now be supplemented by strings, comments, local variables, and other pieces of your code. Looking ahead, we’re working on adding more functionality with different scoping options, improving how we process queries, and looking into opportunities to bring in AI.

The new XML solution file format represents all data models present in the current solution file, ensuring compatibility across project structures. It simplifies conflict resolution during merges, prioritizes readability by replacing complex GUIDs with symbolic representations and human-readable names for project types, and utilizes expressions for clarity when needed. These changes aim to streamline solution file management and enhance user experience.

We’re working on reimagining the experience of configuring Visual Studio to bring a modern, more productive experience to you! Starting with 17.10, you'll be able to try a preview of this feature that brings more room for configuring settings, the ability to customize settings at the user and open solution/folder level, enhanced settings search capabilities, JSON-based storage of settings, and more. As we move through the year, we’ll continue to migrate settings to the new experience and bring additional features and capabilities to the new Unified Settings experience.

Extensibility and personalization

Extensions are a key part of the Visual Studio ecosystem and we're working to make it easier to manage and configure them. We recently released the ability to install extensions from a .vsconfig file in your repo and introduced the brand new Extension Manager to make it easy for users to find, install, and manage their extensions.

We've also continued development on the new VisualStudio.Extensibility SDK (currently in preview) that helps you build extensions that run outside the main IDE process. Bringing extensions out of the main process allows for improved performance and reliability and allows us a chance to focus on developer productivity by delivering a modern, intuitive .NET Core-based API and well-maintained documentation. We’ll soon bring some highly requested abilities to the new SDK including publishing to and management of extensions via the Visual Studio Marketplace and Visual Studio’s Extension Manager. You’ll soon find new features that make it easier to configure and debug your extensions, query the project system, and create powerful debugger visualizers, too.

The team has been working on a refreshed UI for Visual Studio with the goal of improving productivity, creating a more inclusive environment, and keeping up with evolving global accessibility requirements. You can enable a preview of the refreshed UI by going to Tools > Options and checking “Experimental control styles”. We’ve already received some feedback asking for editor light/dark theming to be independent of the shell theme and a better story for fonts and custom themes. We’ll work through these and keep an eye out for additional feedback from users like you as we polish the experience even more.